Posts Tagged → 301
Fixing Crawl Errors from Google Webmaster Tools on IIS7
Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools are a way for Google to notify you (a webmaster) that while googlebot tried to crawl a URL on your site it could not access it. It also gives you a description of the error, the date the error was detected and a list of links that point to that URL.
There’s quite a few reasons an error could occur. What to do with specific error is left entirely up to you. In this article I’ll explain how to fix “Not Found” crawl errors using rewrite rules in Web.config file.
The first thing you should do is check the “Linked from” list for outside links. If someone out there is linking to your site with a wrong URL it won’t do you much good. There are two things that you could do:
- Contact the site that’s linking to you and ask them to correct the link.
- You can make a 301 redirect to the correct URL. This will be explained later on.
All of ‘Not Found’ URLs should return a 404 HTTP status code. You can check this with the Fetch as Googlebot tool. There are 2 options you have when dealing with these:
- If the URL is pointing to a page that was on your site but no longer exists you should return a 410 HTTP status code. This will tell your users, Google and other search engines that your site is ‘Gone’.
- If the URL is pointing to a page that was moved to another URL you should do a 301 redirect that points to the correct URL.
Rewrite Rules and Web.config
Rewrite rules are a set of rules that tell your web server what to do with some URLs. These rules can be quite complex. But
