404 errors still showing in Webmaster Tools

Question

I've a website with Yola, I've been blogging twice a day for three to four years now and suddenly about a month ago, every blog post URL was being seen by Google as a 404 error. I started off by deleting each post, then having to delete the page entirely. Nothing. Google could still see it. I then requested that the main blog pages be deleted using Webmaster Tools, which was accepted, but no good. They still kept on coming back. I have since used URL link tools to make sure there is no sign of the old blog page on my site and I then resubmitted a new sitemap to Google. The problem still persists. I spoke with a technician at Yola yesterday who tells me there is nothing they can do their end and that it's a Google issue. Has anyone any idea on how I might want to go about getting rid of these errors and old pages that do not exist.

I had over 2600 errors at one stage. I selected all of them as being problem solved after trying to fix them and each day the number rises. I'm now seeing around 600. WMT is telling me that it's coming from my sitemap - a-class-driving.com/sitemap.xml but I've checked and the page doesnt exist on there. a-class-driving-school-blog.php was the original blog page.

Any help would be great.

Answer 1

The first thing you need to understand is that if the blog post doesn't exist at all then when Googlebot tries to access it you will receive a 404 error in the search console. In addition even if you remove the page from the search console and from your sitemap.xml file if there are links to those old pages anywhere else on the internet and Google comes across them then the Googlebot will try and index the page again causing the 404 errors to show up. 404 errors are generally no problem, the only reason Google alerts you to 404 errors on your site is in case the page is meant to be there and something has happened to cause the page to disappear and you don't realise it. The other thing to remember is not to mark the 404 errors in the search console as dealt with as this is the same as telling Google the page has been restored try indexing it again, which will return yet another 404 error, and will result in a new 404 alert on your search console.

Answer 2

Let me tell you one thing, Google index your site it means google save your webpages into their databases, now they regularly check your website in order to update their database. Google does not just rely on your sitemap, or who links to you. Once they index your webpages, they start crawling same webpage again and again from their databases, no matter if you change your sitemap or remove all of the links that point to that webpage.

404 not found error not going to help you, because Google assume that, this webpage is not found, but may be, it will available in future. Google removal tool also has some limitation(I think 90 days) after that (or may be earlier), they will start doing same thing.

The simplest solution is just use 410 error code, it simply tell the search engine bot that, that webpage is permently gone, please do not try to index that webpage again or don't show me 404 error message in my search console. Here is nice video by matt cutts who explain very well.