Webmaster Tools 404 Notifications

[jinxed]

I have recently completely removed various pages on a site I run - implementing 410's for these pages (All verified using HTTP Live Headers).

These pages are all showing in GWT as 404 errors. Is there a reason for this? Will these crawl errors soon be removed from GWT?

[tedster]

Check on the right hand side of the report for the source of those URLs - where are those links being found and followed from? If those URLs are yours but those pages no longer link to the newly 404 pages, you're good to go. If you still have links to those URLs, you need to fix that.

Similarly, if those source URLs are on other sites, then you may be losing some inbound link equity and should consider what URL you might point a 301 redirect to.

[g1smd]

It can take several months for the URLs to be dropped from that list.

They are dropped when all of the pages that have linked to the listed pages have been spidered and it has been confirmed that the links on those other pages, or those other pages themselves, no longer exist.

Google WMT reports everything as 404, even when the real response is 301 or 410. That's sloppy programming.

Everything Tedster said above is spot on too!

[jinxed]

Yes, sloppy programming indeed.

None of the links are from my own site, but I will investigate where the links do originate from.

[g1smd]

A common trick when people spam forums and wikis is to add spam to the profile or Talk page and then build a load of spam links from elsewhere to that page. Sometimes they build these links days or weeks before the spam is placed on the site. Once the spam is gone, you're left with that URL appearing in your WMT 404 list while the unwanted incoming external links still exist.