: Why is Google Search Console saying my 404 errors are linked from pages that are long gone? Please Note: I'm not asking what to do here. I'm asking why this is happening, in order to understand

@Alves908

It seems all the pages from a previous version of the site - all with php extension'd pages - continously come back as 404, including the old XML sitemaps from the long-ago-removed Yoast SEO plugin.


To encourage Google to forget about these long gone and never coming back URLs or to at least help differentiate them from more current 404s, you could try returning a "410 Gone" instead of the usual "404 Not Found". This is a stronger signal to Google that these URLs are not coming back.

You could implement this using Apache mod_rewrite in either .htaccess or your server config. For example, to respond with a "410 Gone" for all .php URL requests, then you can do something like:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .+.php$ - [G]


Although, when you say "previous version", it's not simply a previous version of the same site? I assume the content is no longer relevant - so a redirect would indeed be inappropriate.

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@BetL925

There is really no cause to become nervous. Your GSC displays 7 404 errors. All of them are old and/or non-existing.

Remember, GSC gets data from many data centers, there are many latencies on the way. Every some months GSC applyes any data update and looses some data (like not long ago, Google confirmed loosing of up to 50% of link data for some sites).

Well, then no panic and happy new year.

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@Mendez628

To remove the 404 pages from the search console, redirect those 404 pages to the relevant pages so that Users who land on those pages can be redirected to proper pages and doesn't affect User Experience.

After that, you can mark as fixed and it won't be coming back to you again.

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