Strange Webmaster Tools Crawl Report

[Virage]

Up until recently I had robots.txt blocking the indexing of my pdf files which are all manuals for products we sell.  I changed this last week to allow indexing of those files and now my webmaster tools crawl report is listing all my pdfs as not founds.

What is really strange is that Webmaster Tools is listing an incorrect link structure: "domain.com/file.pdf" instead of "domain.com/manuals/file.pdf"

Why is google indexing these particular pages incorrectly?  My robots.txt has nothing else in it besides a disallow for an entirely different folder on my server and my htaccess is not redirecting anything in regards to my manuals folder either.  Even in the case of outside links present in the crawl report supposedly linking to this 404 file when I visit these 3rd party pages they have the correct link structure.

Hope someone can help because right now my not founds are up in the 500s and that can't be good

Thanks is advance!

[wissamdandan]

Hello,

Did you check the "linked From" tab? click on each error and see which are the sites that are linked from

[Virage]

Thanks for the help Wissam!

What I have done is changed all relative paths to direct- then I ran screaming frog and it did not pick up any 404s at all - this was last Thursday.  Unfortunately webmaster tools is still reporting the same style 404s having been discovered since then.  Is there a reason why screaming frog and webmaster tools would be seeing different crawl results?

[wissamdandan]

all link reported in the GWT is based on a crawl.( so there is either an external or internal link pointing to these.com/file.pdf)

So what i would do is fire up Screaming Frog or Xenu and do a full site crawl and check the reports. You might find some pages linking or using relative urls in the a href elements.

If you land into a situation where you have external links pointing to wrong URLS I would recommend either by contacting them or just 301 /file.pdf to /manuals/file.pdf