Hello Maarten

Those RewriteCond entries are cumulative and it looks like there are missing commands.

Who edited that file last, and what did they change?

The way conditionals work is you set a condition, Then you add a command, then a line break You can add more than one condition and it acts as AND

This page has what look like too many conditions and not enough commands -but it could be ok

Try adding a blank line between the rule entries and the Cond entries (but not between the Cond and the Rule entries)

Here is what to do to test anything like this: Save a copy of the .htaccess Then start editing it Delete everything below ##Start rewrites See if that fixes it. If not, the problem is above or if that fixes it, the problem is below Keep cutting the file in half or adding half until you discover the problem line

It is harder with all those conditionals, I suspect it is the lower block that is the problem

So remove those Cond entries from the bottom up

Your sitemap should only list pages that actually exist.

If you delete some pages, then you need to rebuild the sitemap.

Ditto if you delete them and redirect.

Google is always lagging, so if you delete 10 pages and then update the sitemap, even if google downloads the sitemap immediately, they will still be running crawls on the old map, and they may be crawling the now-missing pages, but haven't shown the failures in your WMT yet.

If you update your sitemap quickly, it is possible they will never crawl the missing pages and get a 404 or 301.

(but of course, there could be other sites pointing to the now-missing pages, and the 404s will show up elsewhere as missing)

I am always checking, adding, deleting and redirecting pages, and I update the current sitemap every hour and all the others are rebuilt at midnight every night. I usually do deletions just before midnight if I can, to minimize the time the sitemap is out of sync.

Sorry, yes, it should crawl the links - they used to do that.

But you can prove it to yourself, by doing what I said - and then report back.