This morning I suddenly noticed that the Webmaster tool had over 200 URLs under my domain Not found. I have checked through those links,which are not belonging to my site. How could this happen?Do you guys have any idea?I appreciate any advice.Thanks!
Did some one else own this site before you? Or maybe those links were pages not long ago that are not pages now.
I believe it's from some other site's links indexed which lists old links to pages & files that no longer exist. I've also seen the same situation on my own sites. I have a 9 year old site that went out of commission in 2006. Two years later I resurrected it in Joomla and I'm finding "not found" errors in Google Webmasters for pages in HTML that no longer existed since 2 years previously on my old host. I look at my awstats and i'm finding 404 errors to many of those same old links.
I see a lot of "bad" links - links that have never existed. Mostly, malformed links. As in "close", but not correct. These are links that other sites have created, that are just plain WRONG. They were NEVER right. I just ignore them, since I can't do anything about them. For example, (h)ttp://www.site.com/pagename.ht (missing m), and (h)ttp://www.site.htm/category/pagena (truncated), should be (h)ttp://www.page.htm/category/pagename.htm And many others of a similar nature. I am not going to waste time trying to fix (find) other people's mistakes. There are too many. I have MY OWN mistakes to worry about! Especially, since Google does NOT tell you the source! It would be nice if Google were able to ignore these links, since many are obviously easily detectable (malformed). And, like you folks mentioned, there are many old, old links (years) that still exist on someone's site, somewhere. I have always redirected all my important links, but many pages that I have removed ages ago, still are linked to. It is interesting that Google reports these links, but my hands are tied, in terms of making them go away. . .
I suggest you do not worry about those URLs, I have also seen such URLs for my sites, but after few days, they vanish. So I guess ignoring them is what we should do.
Hi all~thanks a lot for advices!Much appreciated. Actually I had thought so but not so sure. Well now I guess all I should do is ignore those URLs. Thanks again!
Hi friends, The webmaster tools is not accurate in some cases. When it gives like this, just check it once and ignore it because you know that there is no such url's in your site. Then why worrying about this, cool and go on.....
I get these too sometimes when other sites link to me but spell the URLs incorrectly. After a few weeks they disappear from Google Webmasters.
Create a fresh sitemap and resubmit to Google, this way if the URL's is in your site they are going to be fixed. Otherwise just ignore them