Webmaster Tools "Not found" errors after sitemap update

[McTaggart]

Hello Mozzers - I found a sitemap with loads of URL errors on it (none of the URLs on sitemap actually existed) so I went ahead and updated sitemap - now I'm seeing a spike in "not found" errors in WMT - is this normal / anything to worry about when you significantly change a sitemap. I've never replaced every URL on a sitemap before! L

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi Luke,

Generally I wouldn't worry too much about that - the main thing is that you avoid users landing on these 404 pages which it sounds like you are. For reference, here is a helpful article from Google regarding their stance on 404s.

Ideally, if there is a relevant page that you can 301 redirect to, you could do this with certain pages. But it sounds like this may not be possible as the URLs that Google has now crawled never existed in the first place. So I'd recommend that you 301 redirect to another relevant page if possible (but don't mass redirect them all to a single page or your home page) but if there are no relevant pages, leave them as 404s - it is unlikely that they will hurt your rankings.

Cheers.

Paddy