Forum Moderators: DixonJones
In looking into the cause for this, I noticed in Google Webmaster Tools on the dashboard it shows 149 pages were Not Found under the Crawl Errors section. After clicking into the Crawl Errors page to see which pages were not found, it shows a bunch of webpages that never existed on my website. I sell artistic bank checks and all my pages end with .php yet the following page names are showing up as not found:
http://www.example.com/2246-elementary-schools.htm
http://www.example.com/act-6.0.htm
http://www.example.com/cf-w2.htm
http://www.example.com/address.htm
etc.
Further, a search on the command site:http://www.example.com shows the following pages indexed on my site:
http://www.example.com/eagle.htm
http://www.example.com/real-estate.htm
http://www.example.com/copper-pan.htm
http://www.example.com/canadian-credit-checks.htm
etc.
Examples of page names that ARE on my site are disney-checks.php, nature-checks.php, tropical-checks.php, etc.
The ridiculous .htm pages that Google Webmaster Tools is reporting as Not Found on my website never existed on my website or my sitemap and were not linked on my website. Why is Google confusing these webpages with my website and how do I fix it?
[edited by: encyclo at 1:43 am (utc) on May 14, 2009]
[edit reason] switched to example.com [/edit]
I wonder if I should submit a domain removal request to flush out all of the pages that Google has listed for my site, then submit a reinclusion request to ensure that only the .php pages I have now will be indexed.
I'm concerned that Google will continue to devalue my website as it continues to find that the old pages that used to exist on the domain dont exist anymore. You would think they would be able to detect this automatically with a change in IP address, domain owner information, etc...
Any suggestions?
Since these URLs return 404, simply ignore these errors -- or if you feel compelled to do something, then submit individual URL-removal requests.
If your site is being devalued, it likely has very little to do with "404 errors." More likely it has to do with the loss of incoming links and specifically, the loss of the PageRank and link popularity that those links conferred now that all of the URLs on the domain have changed.
If this was my site, I would carefully check that none of those URLs were linked-to from within my own site, and having verified that, I would studiously ignore this "problem" and go work on something else. I certainly would not perform a potential act of self-immolation (domain removal) because of a few pesky 404's being reported! :)
There are several situations where "doing nothing" is the correct answer, and this is one of them.
Work on adding/improving content, getting inbound links, improving on-page and inter-page factors... Ignore the 404s. They only matter if they are your fault (due to bad links on your own site).
Jim
[edited by: jdMorgan at 1:42 am (utc) on May 14, 2009]
