Webmaster Tools - URL Deletion and 404 errors

[azlinda]

Over a year ago, I renamed many of my pages on a very large site. I just discovered Google Webmaster tools, and they list quantities of 404 errors returned on pages that do not exist. Using the URL delete tool, I deleted 500 of them. It returned "denied" on a large percentage of the items I submitted. They are valid 404 errors, so I am at a loss to understand why this is happening.

I also get an error, asking me to resubmit, which I do to no avail.

Has anyone else run into this buzz saw? (I hope not)

[tedster]

I've done a lot of url removal and never run into this kind of thing, but I only ask for a removal when it's important for some reason. If a 404 url is not coming up in current search results, then I just don't worry about it.

Unless a situation becomes a bandwidth sinkhole (which hasn't happened to me) I let googlebot ask for anything it wants to.

[azlinda]

Thanks, tedster. I would love to just get them cleared out of there. I believe it has something to do with my page rank going down and not as high in the Google search results as I have been in the past. There are just too many of these 404s to ignore. I, probably like others, was under the impression that if Google did not find bad links in their spidering, that those links would be automatically dropped, and that each Google Bot resulted in nothing more than good links to the site. I was sure wrong!

[tedster]

Once Google knows that a URL has resolved even one time, it will continue to ask for it indefinitely, although on a schedule that becomes less and less frequent.

I believe it has something to do with my page rank going down and not as high in the Google search results as I have been in the past.

No, it doesn't have that effect -- not unless you have backlinks from external sites pointing to the urls that are now 404. In that casew, redireft those old urls to the new version and you should be all set.

As more and more pages go online, many people find that PageRank goes down, unless they are actively acquiring new backlinks.

If 404 urls somehow hurt a site's ranking or P, competitors could just post pages full of bad links all over the web. Now if your website still has links that point to 404 urls -- that just might cause a problem.

[vero]

One thing that may help in the future, is to use a 301 redirect when you have to rename pages. That way Google won't return a 404 when it looks for the page. Another advantage of the 301 is that, if someone has bookmarked or linked to the old URL for the page, they'll seamlessly wind up on the new one instead of getting a 404.