Sitemaps for Google

[Prospector-Plastics]

In Google Webmaster Central, if a URL is reported in your site map as 404 (Not found), I'm assuming Google will automatically clean it up and that the next time we generate a sitemap, it won't include the 404 URL.

Is this true?

Do we need to comb through our sitemap files and remove the 404 pages Google finds, our will it "automagically" be cleaned up by Google's next crawl of our site?

[KaneJamison]

You should be monitoring them periodically. A quick scan monthly or quarterly depending on how large your site is should be sufficient. I've read reports within the last year that say Bing tends to be picky about sites with 404s in their sitemaps and will begin to distrust them if they get too messy.  I am assuming that Google doesn't like it much, either.

It's very easy to check a large number of links easily, luckily: download the Check My Links Chrome Add-on here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf

Click that while looking at your sitemap, and it will test all of the URLs and make any errors stick out in red. Then fix them.

On the other hand, GWT will report them within a few days of finding them. If you're already in your GWT on a frequent basis, make that one more task to check on.

You should be fixing all 404s with 301 directs. Read "How to Fix Crawl Errors in GWT" for any tricky ones that you can't figure out.

[Prospector-Plastics]

Nice - thanks Kane. Cool Chrome tool too, thanks for the suggestion.

I'm in GWT every morning to check things out since our site is fairly large - about 220,000 pages. The sitemap checker is a really cool new feature in GWT too!