Google Search Console Crawl and Sitemap Errors
Google diagnostic tools can sometimes report crawling errors including "404 not found". These are often caused by external factors not related to XML sitemaps.
When viewing the list of submitted sitemaps, you can see if any of them have
issues.
It is important to note that all problems will cause significant problems for Google when crawling your website and XML sitemap file.
It is possible to see details about the errors by clicking the sitemap file in the list.
This was possible even back when
Google Search Console was called
Google Webmaster Tools:
An error often reported for URLs is
404 : Not Found.
You may get such errors even if your
website has no internal linking errors and your XML sitemap is 100% correct:
Google follows links from websites all over the internet and remembers these for quite a long time.
In our experience, this means that if
some website at some point in time has linked to a non-existing page at
your website, Google will keep reporting this as an error for a long time.
Examples of how incorrect links to your website can occur on external websites:
- Someone posted and mistyped a link to your website on a forum.
- You posted a link on a website which incorrectly shortened it.
Your generated XML sitemaps can not contain URLs that redirect if you want Google sitemap tools to accept them. This includes
error codes 301 : Moved Permanently, 302 : Found
and 302 : Moved Temporarily.
Tip: TechSEO360 never
includes URLs that redirect unless explicitly configured so. Instead it will include the redirect destination URLs.