GWT errors and Google drops this weekend

[mattinertia]

Does anyone get errors in GWT that arent actually there? For example:

http://www.example.com/services.asp 404 (Not found) 4 pages Apr 28, 2009

That page hasnt existed for 6 months and the link to it does not appear on any of the four pages that they've listed. In fact GWT comes out with BS all the time and always reports errors when there arent any. Does anyone else find this?

Also, has anyone else lost rankings over the weekend. I picked up 2 nice links for a client last week, expected to come in this morning and view a boost but alas, the site has dropped back to the same rankings it had 6 months ago...

[edited by: tedster at 3:35 pm (utc) on May 11, 2009]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it cannot be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

There are already several reports of ranking changes in the May thread for watching Google changes [webmasterworld.com].

and, here's a thread [webmasterworld.com] about a similar 404 error in WMT.

[mattinertia]

Cheers Ted

[dstiles]

When I first started my web design business I set up several folders on my own domain for customer sites - web sites on the cheap. About ten years ago - I 301'd them all to real domains.

Google has somehow resurrected at least four of these folder'd urls for one site (at least) and is complaining they are not found. Specifically, they say the "discovery dates" were February, March & April this year. I KNOW that's incorrect.

I found a similar screw-up a year or so back when google lost its database and had to rebuild. I don't suppose they've done that again? :(

There is also an "unlinked" url on the target site proper for example.co.uk/& - gods know how that got in as all the pages have straightforward asp extensions with no querystrings. Google playing guessing games again?

[g1smd]

They have either found some real links pointing to those resources, or they have old data in their database which they want to re-verify, and purge if defunct.

There's nothing to worry about when they report URLs - that you know don't exist - as not existing.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

You will see that the 4 pages that have been listed by Google for the 404 link has a cached date of the time where the link was actually present on those pages (this cache date can be as old as 8 months as I have also witness the same in my WMT for some pages). Next time these pages will be cached, these errors would go. Though they might keep re-appearing from time to time...

[edited by: AnkitMaheshwari at 9:38 am (utc) on May 12, 2009]