: Google Webmaster Tools reporting 404s for pages that are not in the sitemap (but were there previously) Google Webmaster Tools is reporting 404 errors on URLs that are not present in the submitted

@BetL925

Once Google crawls a URL, it will continue to crawl that URL forever. It doesn't matter if it is no longer in your sitemap. It doesn't even matter if you never had a page there at all. If Google found a link to it at some point in the past, you may see it in your 404 report on an ongoing basis.

Google's John Mueller said that 404 errors don't hurt your site's indexing and ranking. There is really no reason to worry about 404 errors in this report unless you expected those pages to be found.

If you want to clean up that report you can always redirect the URLs to other similar pages, or return the 410 Gone status.

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