Google Webmaster Tool + Crawl Errors & SEO

by 8 replies
11
Hello everyone,

Earlier today, I decided to take a few extra minutes to explore my Google Webmaster Tool account. In the past all I ever did was login and submit my new site, and sitemap.

But apparently I should be paying a little more attention to the sites that I add. Because one of the sites apparently has 139 crawl errors:

Not followed (redirect error) - 1 error in total. It then says that the URL was detected on Aug 2, 2010.

Not Found (404) - 138 errors in total. Under the "linked from column", it says "unavailable" for most of the links, and the rest say "h**p://mydomain.net/sitemap.xml.gz". All the URL's were detected at a later date.


Thank you,
Gordon
#search engine optimization #crawl #errors #google #seo #tool #webmaster
  • These errors might bring a negative influence on SEO only if the number of them is exceeding some threshhold (lets say 5% out of total indexed pages). Google often makes mistakes with a correct definition of urls, so he cannot make solid negative decisions based on this metric.

    PS. With mine 100 000 of pages indexed, I always have 100-200 not found urls. Most of them are irrelevant since they look like site.com//page (double slash or something like this).

    Regards
    George
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks for the response!

      So if Google says that the link was "detected". Is it safe to assume that the error is now fixed, and the url's indexed?

      Just curious, because it seems like a lot of errors for such a small blog (200 url's in web index).

      Thanks,
      Gordon
      • [1] reply
  • Hi,
    nice help full information thx for share.
  • Hi Gordon, you can try this, should be working.
    Still not clear what are the other 137 urls return the 404 code. All of the are ending with gz?

    George
    • [1] reply
    • Hi George,

      I think I may have discovered the problem. When I was looking over the install instructions for the Google XML Sitemaps plugin I discovered that I missed a step.

      Step 2 of the install says the following:

      Use your favorite FTP program to create two files in your WordPress directory (that's where the wp-config.php is) named sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz and make them writable via CHMOD 666

      So this is were I messed up, I created the two files but failed to change the file permissions.

      So this is what I did:
      • Changed the file permissions to the correct permissions
      • Rebuilt the sitemaps
      • Re-submitted both sitemap.xml & sitemap.xml.gz to Google Webmaster Tools.
      So hopefully the above actions will take care of all future crawl errors.

      Thanks,
      Gordon
  • Yeap, I think this should work.

    Good luck!
    George
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