'404 not found' erron in site map?

Discussion in 'Google Sitemaps' started by rahman15, Mar 2, 2006.

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  1. #1
    Does it hurt your ranking or anything if you have '404 not found' error in google sitemap?
     
    rahman15, Mar 2, 2006 IP
  2. stuey

    stuey Peon

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    #2
    Do you mean that sitemap.xml is not being found or that pages that are referred to in the sitemap.xml are not being found?
     
    stuey, Mar 3, 2006 IP
  3. rahman15

    rahman15 Well-Known Member

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    #3
    I meant the pages that are referred to in the sitemap.xml are not being found?
     
    rahman15, Mar 3, 2006 IP
  4. stuey

    stuey Peon

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    #4
    I've been doing some digging for you and a sitemap with occasional 404 pages, will not affect your ranking.

    It is, however, preferential to keep the sitemap as up-to-date as possible - you would be a better netizen as the google db will have less 404 pages!

    S
     
    stuey, Mar 4, 2006 IP
  5. softplus

    softplus Peon

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    #5
    You can bet there will be tons of old, discarded, non-updated sitemap files out there in the future. Google will count URLs in sitemap files like any other link from your site, so don't worry too much :).

    However, you are loosing potential visitors by having URLs 404 that might be indexed and listed on the search engines. At the very least you should be using a custom 404 page (that returns 404) with a short site-menu on it to help the visitor get "somewhere".
     
    softplus, Mar 14, 2006 IP
  6. domregchief

    domregchief Peon

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    #6
    I had a couple of 404's and it did not seem to affect my ranking. Since you know that there are 404's fix your sitemap and resubmit it.
     
    domregchief, Mar 16, 2006 IP
  7. Sarangan

    Sarangan Well-Known Member

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    #7
    Google have told on their words that sitemap doesn`t affect PageRank and their normal crawl system.. So don`t worry about that..
     
    Sarangan, Mar 18, 2006 IP
  8. phd

    phd Active Member

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    #8
    Even my site has some 404 errors for robot.txt but I don't thinks so that It affects ranking!!
     
    phd, Mar 21, 2006 IP
  9. softplus

    softplus Peon

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    #9
    Oh, but if your robots.txt 404's then anything you have in there will / can be ignored.

    I wouldn't say that doesn't matter :)
     
    softplus, Mar 21, 2006 IP
  10. Sarangan

    Sarangan Well-Known Member

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    #10
    I don`t know about it affects the ranking.. But it is not a bigger work to have 404 errors pages. It is easier with .htaccess..
     
    Sarangan, Mar 23, 2006 IP