GWT giving me 404 errors based on old and deleted site map
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I'm getting a bunch of 404 crawl errors in my Google Webmaster Tools because we just moved our site to a new platform with new URL structure. We 301 redirected all the relevant pages. We submitted a new site map and then deleted all the site maps to the old website url structure.
However, google keeps crawling the OLD urls and reporting back the 404 errors. It says that the website is linking to these 404 pages via an old outdated sitemap (which if you goto shows a 404 as well, so it's not as if Google is reading these old site maps now). Instead it's as if Google has cached the old sitemap but continues to use it to crawl these non-existent pages.
Any thoughts?
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How long has it been since you deleted the old sitemap and provide the new one ?
I think your Google account may just need some extra time to update correctly. it seems to me that Google updates in my WMT account seems to have a little lag time. I think it will update correctly after a few weeks to a month. I don't think you have any actual problem as much as Google is not actually finding and updating new info correctly.
I would wait and see what happens after a short while.
Joe
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As long as it's 301'ing the important ones then that's ok. The 404's will regularly pop up in this scenario as long as it crawls something that it encounters a page with the link or from the index and follows it to a 404. Just mark them as fixed.
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