How to explain "No Return Tags" Error from non-existing page?
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In the Search Console of our Google Webmaster account we see 3 "no return tags" errors. The attached screenshot shows the detail of one of these errors.
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I know that annotations must be confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly.
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However, the originating URL (/#!/public/tutorial/website/joomla) doesn't exist anymore. How could these errors still show up?
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Hmm great question. If that error was from May I would re-submit your sitemap and see if that doesn't cause a re-index & fix this error.
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Since it's one page and doesn't even exist anymore, I honestly wouldn't lose sleep over it. There's no way to add/patch that return tag, because there's no page to add it to. Your tags on the German and Dutch homepages all seem consistent. I'd consider this a warning at best and not one likely to cause you trouble.
My only caveat - if, for some reason, Google is still indexing a bunch of AJAX-style URLs that don't exist, you may have some general crawl oddity. If this really is the only error like this you're seeing, though, it's more likely something Google just hasn't let go of yet. As Britney said, try to kick Google to reindex/recache, but otherwise I think it's likely harmless.
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Great, thanks for your responses. We'll re-submit our sitemap, and I'll share our findings here.