Hi, I hope this is a good place to post this question. I have a problem with Google's Webmaster Tools. The Website is a Real Estate Website with an IDX solution. This means that there are thousands of pages - for all the listing details pages. Now the problem is - I had a broken link in the footer so the broken link appeared on all of these pages, and google crawled the site. Now in the google Webmaster Tools section it shows like 300 404 pages and It keeps climbing every day - even though I've fixed broken links? Does anyone know what is up with that ? - how do I stop this. Thank you.
You don't have to worry about it. Be patient and Google will automatically find it out when it spiders your website next. I think submitting a sitemap can make it fast.
Yeah - that's what I figured, but I really need something to tell my client. He's loosing it - thinks that it's the reason his rankings are falling.
If you don't mind telling a small lie, tell him that you have talked with an agent from Google. He said its ok, and that its usual for new websites to have have broken links in it. I don't encourage lying to your clients but in this particular case, it doesn't hurt
lol - yeah ... I'll give that a shot. But really I think the honest truth is that there is nothing that I can do, and that Google will eventually figure out that I fixed the broken link. Just never had one broken link cause this much trouble b4. - and there is no way to make it stop adding 404 pages to the webmasters tools screen. The only real answer is "just wait longer" ? Thanks
rederick, there are two questions for you: 1 - for the 404 page error, what are the published dates when the Googlebot last crawled into them? 2 - you said you have updated the footer, but have you recrawled and resubmited the new sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools?
I try to fix the most common 404 errors I get from outside/old links by redirecting them to a relevant page.
Hello, My Client is still loosing his mind over this. In the webmaster tools it shows that he has 780 404 pages! and getting bigger every day - Is something wrong with this webmaster tools? Cause I have fixed the broken link! It makes no sense. Anyways... Question 1) the 404 pages have published dates as recently as today. 2) I have created a new sitemap and submitted it in. ( the pages that the broken link was on was not even in the sitemap) Thomas - redirecting them? Do you use a 301 redirect? I was thinking about doing this but was not sure that this was the best method. Since the page never existed, how can I perminatly move a non-existant page. This webmaster tools thing has really got me in a sitchuation here. How do I stop the webmaster tools from reporting these 404 pages?
ok - I think I've got it. It must be that google has the broken link cached on some of these pages.. then It seems to be using this cache to crawl the site or something ( I'm not a search engine expert) . So I think that If I set up 301's for these broken links that it'll stop this out of control 404's. Sounds like a plan eh?
Is that faster the indexing of pages from "Google Sitemap" than backlinks from other sites with PR0-PR3?
I think back links from pages with high pagerank will make the indexing faster, provided the pages are visited frequently. Whereas the sitemap is crawled within 2-3 days of submission.
Set 301 for that broken link or simply do a redirect using .htaccess file. Another thing to do is to send a sitemap and make sure the "lastmod" tag on all URLs should give a date later than when the fix to the broken link was done. The Google webmaster tools also lets you set a crawling rate, so set that to "fastest"