Strange increase of pages not found GWT

[MarcelMoz]

Hello,

Since the 30th of August there has been a strange increase of pages not found in Google Webmaster Tools. Since we have a webshop there has always been like 26k not found pages because productpages of products that are sold out go offline for a while and when a product will never come back, it will be deleted without a 301 redirect. This causes a high amount of pages not found which has never caused any problems. On the 30th of August the amount of 26k increased to 46k and keeps on being this amount since.

I can only export 1k of 'bad URL's' so I can never find the ones that cause this increase. Does anybody have an idea how to find out what caused this increase? I already asked IT and nothing big has changes on the 30th of August.

GWT says it's just Desktop and not Smartphone. Also DNS, server connectivity and robots.txt are ok.

Hope anybody can help me because (accidentally?) we have lost two very important number 1 positions in Google in the last few days so there might be something going on that Google doens't like.

Thanks in advance.
Marcel

[ViviCa1]

This isn't going to answer your question, but we have experienced the same issue. Ours used to sit at between 300-400 (also an ecommerce website) - on the 27th August it went up to 2.2k and then on the 30th it jumped to 7.8k and then a day later to 10.2k. These are also just desktop, not smartphone.

Would be very interested if anyone else has also seen this? We did make some minor changes to our website on the 27th and 29th but nothing that would explain this. So I'd be very interested in any replies as well.

Thanks.

[MarcelMoz]

Hi ViviCa1,

It seems like we have the same problem, and nobody knows a solution for it. Maybe we can help each other by keep testing to find out what caused this high amount of 404 errors.

If you found anything, please keep me up to date. I will do the same!

Marcel

[ThomasHarvey]

Have you tried doing a crawl of your site to see if there may have been an error now causing these types of pages?

[ViviCa1]

Hi Marcel, will do. For now I am just marking all the errors in Search Console as fixed as I cannot actually find them linked from anywhere and I will see if they come back.

[isabelledylag]

Hi,

We have exactly the same problem as of 10th september the 404 rose dramatically they are all vert old pages from our webshop.

Isabelle

[ViviCa1]

Same here, they look like old product pages that no longer exist but no idea where Google dug them up.

[MarcelMoz]

Hi there,

In the past few weeks I found one major source of the 404 increase. Unfortunately for you this was an internal change from our webshop host in the way the self referring canonical got built up. It added an extra 'www.' to a specific group of URL's. We fixed this so now I'm marking those errors as resolved.

Does anyone know how to show all of the errors in stead of the top 1000 list? Since we have 50k errors, this will take me 50 days to get to the last batch.

@ViviCa1: another part of the extra 404 errors come from old product pages, just like you said. Maybe Google decided that not redirected URL's are still important so we get the chance to redirect them now? I'm setting up an internal workflow to start redirecting all non existing productpages from the past but also in the future to prevent huge lists of 404 errors in GWT.

Marcel