Why might Google be crawling via old sitemap, when the new one has been submitted and verified?
-
We have recently relaunched Scoutzie.com and re-submitted our new sitemap to Google. When I look on Webmaster tools, our new sitemap has been submitted just fine, but at the same time, Google is finding a lot of 404s when crawling the site. My understanding, it is still using crawling the old links, which do not exists. How can I tell Google to refresh it's index and to stop looking at all the old links?
-
Yes it should. However, as Alan mentioned below, if you still have links pointing to the 404 pages, Google will always attempt to crawl them, and will keep you informed that you have errors.
If you do have external links to those 404 pages, you can 301 redirect them to an appropriate page using .htaccess. This way you'll keep the link value and also get rid of the Webmaster Tools error.
If you don't have any links to them, then yes, Google will eventually stop trying to crawl them.
-
It's very likely that we do. Given that I cannot track down a 1000+ links that now 404, will they eventually fall out by themselves, or do I have to tell Google that everything that's 404'ed should be dropped from crawl index? Thanks!
-
What if I simply pushed the new sitemap over the old one? In other words, scoutzie.com/sitemap is the same link, except now it contains the new map. That should be okay, right?
-
you may still have links pointing to those 404 pages on your site or externally. If not then eventually they will fall out of the index
-
Hey scoutzie,
This is actually covered pretty well in Joe Robison's blog post on fixing Webmaster Tools crawl errors: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools
I'll quote the related info:
"One frustrating thing that Google does is it will continually crawl old sitemaps that you have since deleted to check that the sitemap and URLs are in fact dead. If you have an old sitemap that you have removed from Webmaster Tools, and you don’t want being crawled, make sure you let that sitemap 404 and that you are not redirecting the sitemap to your current sitemap."
Hope this helps, good luck!
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
-
Unsolved Moz can't crawl my site
Moz is being blocked from crawling the following site - https://www.cleanchain.com. When looking at Robot.txt, the following is disallowing access but don't know whether this is preventing Moz from crawling too? User-agent: *
Moz Pro | | danhart2020
Disallow: /adeci/
Disallow: /core/
Disallow: /connectors/
Disallow: /assets/components/ Could something else be preventing the crawl?0 -
Why my site not crawl?
hi all me allow rogerbot in robots.txt but rogerbot can't crawl my site my site: toska-co.ir
Moz Pro | | jahanidawodi0 -
Google Local results ranking
Are Google Local position results included in Moz ranking reports? If not, how can these be tracked and monitored? Is a Google Local result likely to achieve a similar CTR as previous organic results? Some of our previous good organic search rankings seem to have been replaced by Google Local results for our restaurant and hotel clients. Is this likely to achieve the same traffic and if not, is there a way to get back to organic results? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | ignitehospitality0 -
The crawl report shows a lot of 404 errors
They are inactive products, and I can't find any active links to these product pages. How can I tell where the crawler found the links?
Moz Pro | | shopwcs0 -
Crawled pages are missing and showing just 1 page crawled
One of my campaign has got around 8500 pages crawled(seomoz) and reports are shown, but suddenly it is showing 1 page crawled. Why it is happened like this? How can i get back the previous reports?
Moz Pro | | Sulekha0 -
Why does my crawl diagnostics show duplicate content
My crawl diagnostics show duplicate content at mysite.com and mysite.com/index.html which are essentially the same file.
Moz Pro | | MSSBConsulting0 -
How do I find questions with new responses?
I'm really enjoying hanging out here so far. I was wondering if there is an easy way to find out which of the discussions that I am taking part in have new responses in them. I know I get an email whenever a question I have subscribed to gets an answer, but is there a way to see this when I am on the website? I see that I can go to "My questions" and "Questions I have asked" or "Questions I have answered" but on that screen it doesn't tell me which one(s) of those questions have new answers. Am I missing something?
Moz Pro | | MarieHaynes1