600+ Very Old Pages Just Appeared in GWT

Redirect, 404, 410?

[Frank_Rizzo]

Google Webmaster Tools has recently added 600+ pages to Crawl->Crawl Errors->Not Found

e.g.
tickets_admin.php?ticket_id=1001&mode=edit
tickets_admin.php?ticket_id=1023&mode=edit
tickets_admin.php?ticket_id=1468&mode=edit

This is odd, because those pages were not used for over 10 years.The project was completely re-written resulting in a different method of administrating tickets.

The tickets_admin.php page was deleted before 2005. It is not in the logs, the site map, and nothing links to it. So why has Google decided to crawl 600 of them now?

Secondly what is the best way to deal with this? Should I

1. just ignore it and leave them all as 404s
2. rewrite all requests to a single tickets_admin.php page and 404 just that
3. the pages really have gone - they will never come back so should they all or a single page be 410?

[engine]

Fundamentally, Google could be revisiting old pages it had deep within it's memory, or there's a link to it from somewhere. The chances are that Google may never come back to those now that it discovered it's a 404. Do some research as there could be a link to it from somewhere and it seems a shame to not show some form of redirect to the current, or most appropriate page.

[not2easy]

When I see 404s listed that I know were removed years ago, the first thing I do is click on a few and in the dialog box that pops up, I click on "Linked From" to see where they got the moldy links. Quite often it claims they were on a sitemap so obviously they are referring to some very old version of a sitemap.

Once in a while I find some link from a different site I never heard of, but usually it is just G in their rocking chair on the porch, fondly recalling some old piece of a sitemap it once saw long ago. I just mark them as fixed and forget about them. The crawl errors report is for your own information, it is not an issue that needs to be dealt with other than marking them as fixed so they don't pile up in the interface.

If the link contains some format or syntax that should not have been crawled, I add that URL parameter to the list and request it not be crawled.

[Frank_Rizzo]

There were no links to the pages: they were admin pages. What must have happened is that the sitemap picked them up and google got them that way.

in GWT there is no source info. All it says is the URL:

[Error Details]
Last Crawled: 9/11/15
First Detected: 8/20/15
Googlebot couldn't crawl this URL because it points to a non-existent page

As I said these pages have not existed for over 10 years. They have not been in the sitemap for over 10 years.

I have marked them as fixed. Will see if they come back.

[lucy24]

G in their rocking chair on the porch, fondly recalling some old piece of a sitemap it once saw long ago

Thank you, not2easy, I will remember this image forever :)