Webmaster Tools 404s

[jandunlop]

We try to keep our 404s in google webmaster tools to a minimum but in recent months, the volume has simply exploded to over 500k errors. 99.95% of this is complete spam linking to pages that never existed.

Have tried marking as resolved but they just end up back in the list eventually and don't like the idea of 301ing so many links when the pages never existed in the first place.

We can just ignore them all but this makes it hard to identify legitimate 404s that need redirecting as there is only so much data we can export out of WT.

Has anyone had experience with returning 410s? Does google eventually drop these from WT?

[zeepartner]

that seems to be a common problem, that GWT is slow in removing old 404s, even if they haven't been present for ages. i have that problem particularly from urls that have temporarily shown up on a xml-sitemap. 6 months later, they're still there...

guess as usual, we'll just have to wait for the bug to be fixed...