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To just reiterate this further, I am still 301'ing urls that have been dead for nearly 5 years. I still get requests in for them. I don't want to 404 them in fe
by chrislomax 14y ago
To just reiterate this further, I am still 301'ing urls that have been dead for nearly 5 years. I still get requests in for them. I don't want to 404 them in fear of losing that slight bit of traffic so I just 301 them. I am really surprised they don't remove these urls from their cache and I can't think for the life of me why they don't?
- gizmo686 14y agoThey might have some obscure incoming url from somewhere else on the net.
- SquareWheel 14y agoWebmasters should show that. If you 404 the page it'll appear in the errors pane after some time and show incoming sources.
- gizmo686 14y agoIt sounds like the only thing requesting the 404`ed page was google bot, which I do not believe tells you the referrer. If this is true, then it would mean either that google does not clear their cache (which I doubt), or that the link exists somewhere on the net, but in a place where no human would find it. I've done some work with web crawlers, and it you fall into that type of hole alot more often than I would expect.
- SquareWheel 14y agoI'm not sure I understand, why wouldn't Webmasters show that one hard to find link if Googlebot found it?
- eli 14y agoI removed a whole section from the site at the same time. Webmaster Tools shows the incoming links for every page in the section as other pages in that section. It's a whole loop of pages linking to each other and generating inbound links even though they all no longer exist and haven't for many months.
- SquareWheel 14y agoYeah, Webmasters is reaally slow to update. Thankfully they offered a way to delete old pages. If they come back though, then it should show the source of the link.