Google Web Tools - Web Crawl 404s

Determining where Google is getting mistyped/non-existent URLs

[LegalAlien]

Hello,

We have a couple of 404s appearing in Google's Webmaster Tools Crawl Errors. These are for typo URLs and URLs that were removed a long time ago.

Unfortunately Google doesn't provide details of where those links were crawled. I've been through our entire site and am absolutely sure they are not internal links. I've also searched for the URLs just about everywhere, but cannot find anything.

I don't think it's old data, as the last calculated date is current. I'm hoping that someone knows how I can find out where these are, so I can ask the sites to fix this.

Thank you.

[tedster]

Those bad urls might even be from links on pages that are fixed or long removed. As long as your server is returning a 404 status, and those bad urls are not originating from your pages or sitemap, then I'd say you can quite safely give it no more thought.

If those urls did resolve at one time, Google may keep checking for quite a while - no problem, they're just being obsessively thorough.

[rocker]

If those urls did resolve at one time, Google may keep checking for quite a while - no problem, they're just being obsessively thorough.

That's putting it mildly. I registered an expired domain name in 2001. Put up a website in 2002 and I am getting an error for a URL that was on the site of the previous owner.

Hey! If I make that URL into a active page will it rank high, based on it's age :)

[LegalAlien]

Thanks tedster. Yes, our server returns a proper 404, and those bad URLs are definitely not from anywhere on our site or sitemap. I realize a couple of crawl errors are no big deal, but I really wanted to fix this.

Well, rocker, I've got that beat -- one of the 404s is from a glossary term description page that hasn't existed since 1999. The entire site layout has changed 5 times since then! Let me know if you re-add the page and it ranks well -- I'll then add this one and do better ;P

[edited by: LegalAlien at 3:09 am (utc) on Feb. 21, 2007]

[Oliver Henniges]

> Hey! If I make that URL into a active page will it rank high, based on it's age :)

It surely will. Give it a try. There's riskless money there, as long as you make sure you get no duplicate content. Put some adsense on it.

However, this does not work for all the error reports: Besides my efforts to wipe out internal mistakes, I constantly receive errors, which point to an (long) URL absolutely identical with googles visible abbreviated anchor-text on that webmaster-central page.

With this URL being ungrammatical and very very unusual, I am absolutely sure this comes from some google-internal glitch. I tried to bring this topic up several times, but it seems noone is really interested in.