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Google webmaster tools is reporting some/many 404 urls that don't exist on my site. The links are things such as domain.com/xyz/ However that doesn't exist, but domain.com/xyz/index.html does exist. The "linked from" pages all show proper links to the "/xyz/index.html".

The page without index.html DOES 404, but why is google even trying these urls if they are not linked to?

My real question, is there a way to have google stop attempting to load these pages, and ultimately remove these from the crawl errors report. Thanks.

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Google is probably trying them because someone has linked to those pages on their website or Google is assuming their is an index page for all of your directories of which there are none.

You have two possible solutions:

  1. Do a 301 redirect from the /xyz/ to /xyz/index.html, etc. This will tell Google that /xyz/ has moved to /xyz/index.html and to stop looking for it.

  2. Tell Apache to use index.html as the index file for your directories. You can do that by placing this snippet in a file called .htaccess and placing it in your web root:

DirectoryIndex index.html

If you choose option two be sure to also use canonical URLs on your index.html pages so you avoid duplicate content issues.

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