Google Webmaster Tools reports 404s for plain text. Should I create those URLs and 301 them to actual pages?
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IA few years back I noticed that Google Webmaster Tools returns 404s from regular text containing a URL, but no anchor tag. I came accross this again today. Is it worthwhile to create those URLs and 301 redirect them to proper pages.
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Hi Svetoslav,
Great question because I saw exactly something like this a couple of weeks ago in our own Google Webmaster Tools. Google tried to crawl "urls" on our side which were used to generated pageviews for Google Analytics by using the _trackPageview. So we had a lot of urls like "/print" within our Not Found crawl errors.
I won't recommend creating new URLs and using a 301 redirect to "cover" them, for a couple of reasons:
- From my opinion the Not Found errors do not harm you're rankings within the SERPs, to give you an idea or maybe you experienced it yourself. We have ten thousands of Not Found errors because our content changes on a daily basis and we saw it makes no sense.
- Google is trying to crawl urls which don't exist because they are text, so it looks like to me they are doing something wrong.
- And I also would like to share this thread from WebmasterWorld ( ), it includes an interesting angle in my opinion: "S_ave the 301 (and its machine process) for important cases"._
What do you think?
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