: Ghost not found 404 pages keep popping up in Google Search Console We've been scratching our head with 404s that continually pop-up on Google Search Console. These are very old links (4+ years),

@Cofer257

That's just how Google Search Console works. If you get a link to a page that doesn't exist, Google will keep checking that page occasionally for ever more. And it will keep warning you that those pages do not exist, even if they never existed in the first place.

The pages in the Crawl Errors are ordered by priority, which appears to be based on (a) how many links point to that page and (b) whether those links are from the site itself (i.e. only one link from an external site will have lower priority).

So start at the top, click each URL then the "Linked from" tab to see where Google thinks the link is coming from. Fix the broken link if possible. Once you start getting to pages you cannot fix just give up and move on.

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@Sent6035632

A 404 status code means that the page isn't found. Google interprets this as a temporary status and will come back to it to see if the page is live (that's why you're seeing those pages in GSC).

A 410 status code, however, means that the page is gone and never coming back. When Google encounters a 410 status code, it assumes the webmaster purposefully took the page down and stops trying to crawl it.

If possible, change the status codes of those pages to 410.

More information on it here: searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2340728/matt-cutts-on-how-google-handles-404-410-status-codes

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