GWMT - Are These Warnings Bugs or Not?

[hugh]

I'm getting repeated warnings about supposedly inaccesible pages which are accessible to me in google webmaster tools. Has anyone else seen this? Should I be looking into possible issues or are they false reports / bugs? I don't want my domains to be penalised for being unavailable...

Thanks.

Hugh

[vero]

Do you mean it lists pages as being "not found?" If it's a file name that you don't have (and you've checked all your internal links to make sure it's not there, as a typo) then it could be someone has linked to you with the wrong file name url.

[iridiax]

Numerous or frequent URL unreachable errors [google.com] can be a serious problem. I had lots of these for one of my sites, and as a result, Google stopped indexing all of my new pages and my Adsense ads lost their targeting. I fixed the problem by switching to a less oversold shared web host.

[hugh]

The error is a sitemap warning which goes as follows...

"URLs not followed:

When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot because they contained too many redirects. Please change the URLs in your Sitemap that redirect and replace them with the destination URL (the redirect target). All valid URLs will still be submitted."

Anyway not to worry. I've given it more thought and I know how to proceed...

[Bewenched]

I'ts not just you Hugh. I get them all the time, I just resend the sitemap and they're gone. However I do notice severe drops in traffic if they show up. So now I have to check it every day.

I check the pages .. and they're there and we're on a dedicated server.

[hugh]

Missing slashes at the end of URLs in your sitemap file seem to be a factor...

e.g: http://www.example.com/directory/ not http://www.example.com/directory

[ChicagoFan67]

I'm getting the message that my site has not been verified (when it previously was).

"We encountered an error looking up your site's domain name". I tried to re-verify and got the same.

Over a week ago I added several new pages and google has yet to list them. It normally only takes 2 or 3 days.

I had a look in my log files and Googlebot is still visiting.

Does anybody know how to go about handling this one?

Other sites on the same shared hosting account are still showing as verified!

[edited by: ChicagoFan67 at 5:40 am (utc) on Mar. 28, 2008]

[tedster]

Google does re-verify periodically. If you still have either the html file or the meta tags in place, it should not be a problem.

The nature of that error message sounds like some DNS error may have shown up. I'd use some of the online DNS tools and reports to check the DNS, make sure the verification file or meta tag is in place, and then try again after fixing anything you turn up.

[ChicagoFan67]

Thanks. I was able to verify successfully this morning.

I asked my hosting company to look into the DNS thing and they had this to say:

"According to some research, if Google tries to hit your server, when the server is under some load and or other downtime, it will return this
error. Google should try again in the near future though."