Does anyone here experience having trouble with google webmaster tools?
3 days after I resubmit my sitemap.xml on GWT, I saw bunch of crawl errors on my GWT
My Problem is GWT crawl a page on my site that doesn't exist, i mean the URL does not exist, The page is a 404 not found and it appears on crawl errors.
How do you deal with it?
I just deleted all the errors, but I still am curious about it.
Thanks a lot in advance
theemerchant
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82 posts since Sep 2009
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Your sitemap is just a hint for google and not an instruction on what pages google should index.
Google will still crawl all links into and within your website to find pages. If any of them lead to a missing page then WMT will tell you with the 404 error.
As Allison2009 states, the best way to handle a page that is indexed but no longer exists is to set-up a redirect from it to a relevant page that does exist (use a 301 Permanent Redirect).
These lost pages are indexed because they did exists and you or another website are still linking to them. Always try and find out where the bad link is and fix it.
Tiggerito
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59 posts since Jul 2010
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is it okay if i just deleted it all? the redirection is no use because the page crawl by google is not really related to the site :D i don't know where the page came from. I just resubmit the sitemap.xml then a day or 2 I checked the crawl errors then there it was 230 crawl errors. check all the page then the page is completely a 404 not found
theemerchant
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Those pages may have a ranking with Google even if you don't know what they are about. Deleting them is just throwing that ranking away, while 301 redirecting is asking Google to pass it on to a new page.
If they have no relevance then you could still redirect them to your home page.
Tiggerito
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59 posts since Jul 2010
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