Too many not found links in Webmaster tool Affects Site Quality?

[steveschmidt85]

I have so many not found links in my webmaster tool. Suppose in some sites if website url is long than it will display there as …. After some characters but it’s actually linked properly don’t know why still it is as no found eg: www.xyz.com/abc (www.xyz.com/abc.html)....

I checked if I can remove that but in some cases I am helpless like if it’s a directory even though I sent them mail for removal they didn’t. I wonder if these can affect my site quality or could be a reason for my keyword position drop?

[Tiggerito]

I wouldn't think they could have a negative effect. If they did then it would become a black hat technique to create lots of broken links to a competitor.

It does give you an opportunity. If you can work out the page they are meant to be going to then you can set-up a 301 redirect from the bad URL to the correct page. This way the link will then work and you may even get a little credit for it.

[steveschmidt85]

No You didn't get it properly i think. Well there is another question here, like somewhere i made typo error while writing my url after some day that will appear as no found link in my webmaster tool even though i corrected that its still there in no found URLs( its been i think 3-4 months also that page also been crawled), All these nofound links can affect my site quality?

[Tiggerito]

If the link is from your own website it may be a flag of poor quality. One link won't do that though.

Google is very slow at dropping 404 pages.

The solution would be still to set up a 301 redirect from the typo link to the correct one. Google should then quickly update it's index and drop that 404.

If you would prefer to just drop the typo link I believe having it return a 410 error will get it removed quicker than leaving it as a 404.

[deepsand]

If you would prefer to just drop the typo link I believe having it return a 410 error will get it removed quicker than leaving it as a 404.
Yep; a 410 is better.

A 404 (Not Found) says "It's not here, and we don't know where it is." In this case a crawler may decide to keep trying for a while to see if it shows up.

The 410 (Gone,) though, says "It used to be here, but we got rid of it." In this case, a well behaved crawler will give up.

[keyon]

I've noticed that Google keeps reported crawl errors listed in GWT for up to a couple months -- long after the problem has been corrected / resolved. The annoying thing is that the total number of "crawl errors" (shown on the dashboard) reflects both old and new errors, which is kind of misleading at first glance.

[deepsand]

Perhaps because attempting to re-crawl 404ed URLs is a low priority.

What you can do to see if this is the case is to look at server logs for the last time that Googlebot requested one of the "old" URLs.

[Handyortung]

@deepsand, I think you're right about "re-crawling 404ed URls is a low priority". If that happened and long time passed what do you think about re-crawling in a high priority (details please), anyone can suggest some way out. Thanks.

[deepsand]

What do you mean by "re-crawling in a high priority?"

[Handyortung]

sorry for my word, actually we faced the same problem on too many 'not found'. Webmaster didn't take any step for long time. Now we want to get high priority about GoogleBot re-crawling. how it's possible to convert it high priority from low priority crawling?

[deepsand]

You have no explicit and direct control over the frequency with which Google re-crawls any page.

Google determines such based on the frequency with which it has observed that a page's content has changed, and the number of external in-bound links it has.

[Tiggerito]

sorry for my word, actually we faced the same problem on too many 'not found'. Webmaster didn't take any step for long time. Now we want to get high priority about GoogleBot re-crawling. how it's possible to convert it high priority from low priority crawling?

If you've fixed the problems I wouldn't worry. Let nature take it's course.