Increased 404 and Blocked URL Notifications in Webmaster Tools

[CUnet]

In the last 45 days, I am receiving an increasing number of 404 alerts in Google Webmaster Tools.

When I audit the notifications, they are not "new" broken links, these are all links that have been pointing to non-existent pages for years that for some reason Google is just notifying me about them. This has also coincided with about a 30% drop in organic traffic from late April to early May.

The site is www.petersons.com and its been around for a while and the site attracts a fair amount of natural links so in the 2 years I've managed the campaign I've done very little link-building.

I'm in the process of setting up redirects for these urls but why is Google now notifying me of years old broken links and could that be one of the reasons for my drop in traffic.

My second issue is my I am being notified that I am blocking over 8,000 urls in my Robots file when I am not. I attached a screenshot.

Here is a link to a screenshot. http://i.imgur.com/ncoERgV.jpg

[LynnPatchett]

Hi,

A bit difficult to say without some more details. Some of it might be outdated information. See: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-fix-crawl-errors-in-google-webmaster-tools for a rundown on how to check it if you haven't already. What urls is it flagging from the robots.txt? Are they still valid urls? In regards the 404s, 28,000 is quite a lot. Has your system changed or been updated recently? Maybe there is a systemic fault going on that is creating these errors? Is the moz scan flagging the same errors?

It is tough to say if the errors have any connection to the drop in visits, but it is certainly something you want to get to the bottom of. I threw your site into xenu (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html) and it was timing out on quite a few of the pages. Is it possible the site is timing out on heavy loads? That might account for the drop in organic visits also...

Lots of questions, not many answers!

[CUnet]

The Moz scan is not showing the same errors. And we haven't made any technological changes. These are incoming links pointing to pages that don't exist anymore. It looks like its been that way for years, I just started getting notified of these and I'm wondering if somehow it is hurting the site.

About the robots file, I just don't know. I've decided to make it blank and re-assess in a few days.

[AndersS]

Hi!

As Lynn points out, there could be some issues in regards to your perceived uptime. Do you see a lot of 404 errors reported in Analytics as well? If this is the case, perhaps your hosting provider (or IT department) should have a look at this?

Also, adding the redirects seems like a good idea, as Google couold be reindexing some sites/pages linking to the old, deleted URL's.

Do you have a custom crawl frequency set up in Google Webmaster Tools? It's worth looking into if Googlebot is slowing down your site.

Good luck.Anders

[Reinhart]

I doubt very much that an increase in old 404s resulted in a 30% organic traffic drop.  I'd look closely at your backlink profile, competition and page quality to try and diagnose why you saw that drop in traffic.

As for the 404s I'd fix those that are fixable and 301 redirect the rest to relevant pages (or the home page).  If the number is extremely large then you should put a high priority on fixing this.  Otherwise I haven't met a site that Google couldn't find a 404 error on.  And yeah, they keep telling you about the same ones!

Hope that helps!

Jacob