One of my sites was hit by Panda on Feb 23. A few days later i noticed a lot of crawl in GWT. Many of them were 404 errors.But one 404 error was striking as the URL reported was to have been crawled from 100s of internal pages.
This was the url.
domain.com/forums/
Most of the internal pages reported to be linking this were navigational pages.
Example -
domain.co/page/30/
domain.com/page/25/
domain.com/category/blu-widgets/page/5/
domain.com/category/red-widgets/page/3/
domain.com.category/green-widgets/
domain.com/
When this algo was rolled out internationally, another website hosted elsewhere and targeting a particular country was also "Pandalized".
It was a much smaller site with less than 400 pages. But I noticed the same error being reported for this site too, since mar 27.Being a small site, GWT reported to have discovered this only on 35 pages since that date.But almost all are navigational pages. The latest discovery date for this was April 14.
For the site affected by the U.S rollout, I now see the report showing only two navigational pages linking to this URL.But the last discovery date was Mar 23.
Has anyone else seen this strange error in their reports? Why is googlebot trying to crawl an URL that doesn't exist? Why is it looking for forums?
