Why might Google be crawling via old sitemap, when the new one has been submitted and verified?
-
We have recently relaunched Scoutzie.com and re-submitted our new sitemap to Google. When I look on Webmaster tools, our new sitemap has been submitted just fine, but at the same time, Google is finding a lot of 404s when crawling the site. My understanding, it is still using crawling the old links, which do not exists. How can I tell Google to refresh it's index and to stop looking at all the old links?
-
Yes it should. However, as Alan mentioned below, if you still have links pointing to the 404 pages, Google will always attempt to crawl them, and will keep you informed that you have errors.
If you do have external links to those 404 pages, you can 301 redirect them to an appropriate page using .htaccess. This way you'll keep the link value and also get rid of the Webmaster Tools error.
If you don't have any links to them, then yes, Google will eventually stop trying to crawl them.
-
It's very likely that we do. Given that I cannot track down a 1000+ links that now 404, will they eventually fall out by themselves, or do I have to tell Google that everything that's 404'ed should be dropped from crawl index? Thanks!
-
What if I simply pushed the new sitemap over the old one? In other words, scoutzie.com/sitemap is the same link, except now it contains the new map. That should be okay, right?
-
you may still have links pointing to those 404 pages on your site or externally. If not then eventually they will fall out of the index
-
Hey scoutzie,
This is actually covered pretty well in Joe Robison's blog post on fixing Webmaster Tools crawl errors: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools
I'll quote the related info:
"One frustrating thing that Google does is it will continually crawl old sitemaps that you have since deleted to check that the sitemap and URLs are in fact dead. If you have an old sitemap that you have removed from Webmaster Tools, and you don’t want being crawled, make sure you let that sitemap 404 and that you are not redirecting the sitemap to your current sitemap."
Hope this helps, good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New pages on my web site
I have created web sites that appear somewhere on Google in hardly any time at all, but I appear to have forgotten something or things are different for pages added recently to an existing website. I have added a page on a particular subject, optimized it using on page grader, so that I get an A, and a check mark for everything except H1 tags and rel=canonical which my web hosting provider does not support. I do have a check mark for accessible to search engines The page has the format http://www.domain.com/specific-keyword It is in the menu, so should have internal links to it, as I understand it. I have created a new site map, and submitted it in webmaster tools. Interestingly it says that of the 96 pages only 76 were indexed is this a clue? and why would they not index a page I have then shared the page on google plus, facebook, tumblr, pinterest and twitter and some others In OSE it comes up as domain authority 28 page authority 1, the social media shares do show up in metrics on the right but no links internal or external are shown, they do on other pages I created in the same way. Is it just a case of waiting or is their something I do to help thank you
Moz Pro | | singingtelegramsuk0 -
Tracking Rankings In Google
Is there a way to see historical rankings of your site in Google. I have a site that has been running for a few years now. I want to see how are Google Ranking has performed throughout the years. We recently redesigned and suffered in rankings but I only know(from Google Analytics) What our traffic used to be, not what our rankings were .
Moz Pro | | pinksgreens0 -
How do a run a MOZ crawl of my site before waiting for the scheduled weekly crawl?
Greetings: I have just updated my site and would like to run a crawl immediately. How can I do so before waiting for the next MOZ crawl? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Crawl Stats Have Dissapeared
Hi SEOmoz I received an email today that another scan has been performed but when I log into my account all the tracking details have disappeared? States Pages crawled N/A. Can someone please help? Temporary problem? Website www.vintageheirloom.com Thanks
Moz Pro | | well-its-1-louder0 -
Crawled pages are missing and showing just 1 page crawled
One of my campaign has got around 8500 pages crawled(seomoz) and reports are shown, but suddenly it is showing 1 page crawled. Why it is happened like this? How can i get back the previous reports?
Moz Pro | | Sulekha0 -
Only one page has been crawled
I am running a campaing for three weeks now and first two crawls was ok but the last one is showing only one page crawled. the subdomain I am tracking is: www.cubaenmiami.com I have everything correct in my site. Regards Alex
Moz Pro | | esencia0 -
Lots of site errors after last crawl....
Something interesting happened on the last update for my site on SEOmoz pro tools. For the last month or so the errors on my site were very low, then on the last update I had a huge spike in errors, warnings, and notices. I'm not sure if somehow I made a change to my site (without knowing it) and I caused all of these errors, or if it just took a few months to find all the errors on my site? My duplicate page content went from 0 to 45, my duplicate page titles went from 0 to 105, my 4xx (client error) went from 0 to 4, and my title missing or empty went from 0 to 3. On the warnings sections my missing meta description tag went form a hand full to 444. (most of these looking to be archive pages.) Down in the notices I have over 2000 that are blocked by meta robots, meta-robots nofollow, and Rel canonical. I didn't have any where near this many prior to the last update of my site. I just wanted to see what I need to do to clean this up, and figure out if I did something to cause all the errors. I'm assuming the red errors are the first things I need to clean up. Any help you guys can provide would be greatly appreciated. Also if you'd like me to post any additional information, please let me know and I'd be glad to.
Moz Pro | | NoahsDad0 -
Will SEOmoz improve my google ranking?
I want to know iwll SEOmoz improve my google ranking. will they improve my keywords.
Moz Pro | | imusmanbutt0