404 Errors Showing in Google Webmaster Tools

Question

My Google Webmaster Tools Account, Shows that I have crawling errors that are caused by links to pages that do not exist (404 not found).

But when I look at the source pages that are accused of having these broken links, there are no such links in them.

As of now, I have 6 404 errors in sitemaps and 28 in the rest of my site.

E.g. the address http://www.webdesk.co.il/articles.php?id=13 does not exist, yet Google indicates that I have 3 pages that link to this address:

http://www.webdesk.co.il/sitemapgen.php
http://www.webdesk.co.il/articles.php?t=css
http://www.webdesk.co.il/articles.php?id=17 //this address dont even exist

If you open each of these pages, you'll see that they don't have these links in them.

I thought this may be a result of an old crawling that was not yet updated, but those pages haven't existed for over than 6 months and Google indicates that all the crawling results are up to date (Dec 22 2012).

Why do I keep getting these 404 errors by Google?

Answer 1

Google does seem to hang on to old urls for a very long period of time, my guess is that:-

• These links exist on another site either because of a typo or other error.

• The content used to be there a very long time ago perhaps an old version of the site created by a former owner of the domain for example.

• An old link which looks like a new link because of htaccess redirection e.g. one of my sites still gets links through to its naked IP but these show up in the logs as the domain because of url redirection settings (took ages to track that down).

• The link exists in the html content but not in the visible part of the page - this most often happens because of errors in visual html editors or commented content.

The best plan is to have your server respond to requests for these urls with a 410 status code otherwise google will keep looking for them.

410 Gone Indicates that the resource requested is no longer available and will not be available again. This should be used when a resource has been intentionally removed and the resource should be purged. Upon receiving a 410 status code, the client should not request the resource again in the future. Clients such as search engines should remove the resource from their indices. Most use cases do not require clients and search engines to purge the resource, and a "404 Not Found" may be used instead.