How to tell Google Search Console a link that led to a Server Coverage Error is a bad link that's not valid?

Question

I got 3 coverage server errors 5xx because of typos and bad linking. So one of my websites had 3 links, say for example:

• www.mypage.com/section-a
• www.mypage.com/section-b
• www.mypage.com/section-c

But this was my bad, I mistyped the links, they should have actually been, for example:

• www.mypage.com/subsection-a
• www.mypage.com/subsection-b
• www.mypage.com/subsection-c

How do I fix this? I have corrected the links, but I'm not sure how to make the server errors go away, since the original links that Google tried to crawl don't really exist (and I don't want to make them exist), so therefore, the "validate" option doesn't work really because those pages aren't real.

Answer 1

Make sure that the non-existent URLs return 404. (Technically, even 500 status codes returned for several crawl attempts will make Google ignore these URLs in the future. But the apt way is to return 404.)

Assuming you are returning 404 code for these pages, Google may still report them as errors. But you need not worry about it. I think they will eventually go away.

Reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203

In general, we recommend fixing only 404 error pages, not 404 excluded pages. 404 error pages are pages that you explicitly asked Google to index, but were not found, which is obviously a bug. 404 excluded pages are pages that Google discovered through some other mechanism, such as a link from another page.