Does Webmaster Tools group 408 and 410 status with 404?

[realmaverick]

Google WMT has been recording a large amount of 404's. All of the pages work fine.

I ran Screaming Frog SEO Spider on a sample of 70,000 URL's. Of those URL's 67 had "Connection Timeout".

There were zero 404's.

Is the server perhaps giving out a 408 or similar and Google is grouping them together with 404's? I've noticed that WMT appears to be grouping 410 with 404's too.

Cheers :)

[aakk9999]

It does group 410 with 404, I am sure of it as I have some pages set to 410 and they now appear in 404 section of WMT.

I am not sure about 408. Perhaps these may come under "Unreachable" in WMT?

<added>
Have you checked your logs and see what pages return 404 to googlebot? This may perhaps tell you more.
</added>

[edited by: aakk9999 at 9:07 pm (utc) on May 1, 2011]

[tedster]

I ran Screaming Frog SEO Spider on a sample of 70,000 URL's

Was that a sample taken from the Webmaster Tools .csv export of the 404 report?

[realmaverick]

Tedster is was just set to run on my domain overnight. In that time it had run 70k urls and returned 67 as unreachable. I tested those URLs and they were all fine.

The 404 report in WMT, I spot tested 50 urls, all of which worked fine. My host says there is nothing server side, that would return a 404. It would be a timeout or similar. Screaming frog appears to back that up.