Google Search Console and Keyword Research

Google Search Console can sometimes report odd website crawling errors, e.g. error "404 - not found". These errors are often caused by external factors.

Search Console Shows Confusing Crawl Errors

Many people submit generated XML sitemaps directly to Google Search Console. However, when viewing diagnostics for website URLs and sitemaps, you will sometimes see mysterious problems being reported.

404 Not Found Errors for URLs

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 tools diagnostics webcrawl

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.

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Complete PPC and SEO keywords toolset. Position check including history, analyze competition, analyze keyword density and content, organize and combine keyword lists and much more.

This help page is maintained by Thomas Schulz

As one of the lead developers, his hands have touched most of the code in the software from Microsys. If you email any questions, chances are that he will be the one answering.