Dealing with 410 Errors in Google Webmaster Tools
-
Hey there!
(Background) We are doing a content audit on a site with 1,000s of articles, some going back to the early 2000s. There is some content that was duplicated from other sites, does not have any external links to it and gets little or no traffic.
As we weed these out we set them to 410 to let the Goog know that this is not an error, we are getting rid of them on purpose and so the Goog should too.
As expected, we now see the 410 errors in the Crawl report in Google Webmaster Tools.
(Question) I have been going through and "Marking as Fixed" in GWT to clear out my console of these pages, but I am wondering if it would be better to just ignore them and let them clear out of GWT on their own. They are "fixed" in the 410 way as I intended and I am betting Google means fixed as being they show a 200 (if that makes sense).
Any opinions on the best way to handle this?
Thx!
-
Thanks!
-
Having the errors in Webmaster Tools is not going to negatively impact your SEO in any way. It's more of a heads up to you, the webmaster, that they have found a page that is missing.
As long as there are no internal or external links to those pages, they should disappear automatically, although it could take months. If you don't want the errors cluttering up your report, then manually marking them as fixed is the way to go.
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
-
Google not pulling my favicon
Several sites use Google favicon to load favicons instead of loading it from the Website itself. Our favicon is not being pulled from our site correctly, instead it shows the default "world" image. https://plus.google.com/_/favicon?domain=www.example.com Is the address to pull a favicon. When I post on G+ or see other sites that use that service to pull favicons ours isn't displaying, despite it shows up in Chrome, Firefox, IE, etc and we have the correct meta in all pages of our site. Any idea why is this happening? Or how to "ping" Google to update that?
Technical SEO | | FedeEinhorn0 -
My backlinks do not register on your software but are registered on my google webmaster tools
Why are my back links not being recognized by any software other than google webmaster?
Technical SEO | | SteveK640 -
How can I make Google Webmaster Tools see the robots.txt file when I am doing a .htacces redirec?
We are moving a site to a new domain. I have setup an .htaccess file and it is working fine. My problem is that Google Webmaster tools now says it cannot access the robots.txt file on the old site. How can I make it still see the robots.txt file when the .htaccess is doing a full site redirect? .htaccess currently has: Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
Technical SEO | | RalphinAZ
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?michaelswilderhr.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.s2esolutions.com/ [R=301,L] Google webmaster tools is reporting: Over the last 24 hours, Googlebot encountered 1 errors while attempting to access your robots.txt. To ensure that we didn't crawl any pages listed in that file, we postponed our crawl. Your site's overall robots.txt error rate is 100.0%.0 -
Increase in authorization permission errors error after site switch
We launched our new site 2 days ago , since site was down for 12 hours for maintenance, we saw google webmaster tool shows this error . Since then google hasnt crawled, its been 36 hours. Do we need to do anyting? We have close to a million page google crawled before and I am wondering if this will effect anything.
Technical SEO | | tpt.com0 -
Google Sitelinks
We have an e-commerce site that has about 50k pageviews of our main shop page every week. However in our Google sitelinks we have one for 'Shop'. However, for the Shop sitelink Google is linking to a random URL that we have never & would never use as a URL and not to our Shop page. I can't work out why Google would pick up this random url as we have so many links etc to the main shop page. Why are they not linking to the right page? I have blocked that url in webmaster tools and done a redirect but I want to understand why it happened in the first place. It included 'swedish+fish' so it seems weirdly spammy?! Any thoughts would be really helpful (and I am only mildly techy). Many thanks
Technical SEO | | ahamill0 -
RSS Feed Errors in Google
We recently (2 months ago) launched RSS feeds for the category pages on our site. Last week we started seeing error pages in Webmaster Tools' Crawl Errors report pop up for feeds of old pages that have been deleted from the site, deleted from the sitemap, and not in Google's index since long before we launched the RSS feeds. Example: www.mysite.com/super-old-page/feed/ I checked and both the URL for the feed and the URL for the actual page are returning 404 statuses. www.mysite.com/super-old-page/ is also showing up in our Crawl Errors. Its been deleted for months but Webmaster Tools is very slow to remove the page from their Crawl Error report. Where is Google finding these feeds that never existed?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
Strange Top URLs for Keywords in Google Webmaster Tools
When we click on one of our keywords under the keywords section of Google Webmaster Tools it shows our top URLs for that keyword. The problem is that it is giving us some very strange URLs that we have searched high and low to try to find but we don't know where they came from. Here is a screenshot: http://bit.ly/pl6mB3 Do you know where this type of URL string could have originated and how to fix it?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
My site has vanished from google
Hi my site has vanished from google. We have been for a very long time. for example if you put in gastric band hypnotherapy then we would be first page number two and also lots of other keywords but now we have vanished from google and i do not know why or how to solve this. can anyone please help me and help me understand what i need to do to solve this please My site is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk I am not sure if i have been banned or why i have dropped out of google
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860