#url-removal Q: Why was my URL removal request denied? A: Next to the denial you should see a  icon or a link to learn more. This will provide details about why your specific removal was denied.If you requested removal of a directory or an entire site, you have to have blocked that content with your robots.txt file in order for your request to be successful. (Returning 404s isn't enough.) If you were requesting a cache removal, make sure you entered the URL of the page (e.g. http://www.example.com) and not the URL of the Google cache (e.g. http://209.85.273.132/search?q=cache:VE9bONM_7xsJ:www.example.com). Make sure your URL met the requirements for removal. If you're still stumped, post a new question in our forum with the details, including what you were trying to remove and what the denial reason says. #links Q: I know I have [one / several / dozens of ] links that Webmaster Tools isn't showing. What gives? A: Although the link reports in Webmaster Tools are more comprehensive than doing a [link:example.com] query in Google search, they may not include 100% of all links that you know about. This is normal and should not be cause for alarm. Webmaster Tools does not always show 100% of the links that Google knows about, so just because a particular link doesn't appear in Webmaster Tools doesn't mean that Google doesn't know about that link, or that your site isn't "getting credit" for that link. Note that the link report in Webmaster Tools only shows whether a site is linking to yours; it doesn't show which links are most significant, and it can include links that are nofollowed or that don't pass PageRank. #404-errors Q: Why am I receiving "Not found" crawl errors for URLs that don't exist on my site?
A: These errors occur when Googlebot tries to access a URL and receives a 404 (Not found) response. This can happen when Googlebot follows an invalid link, which may be mistyped or outdated. If you don't recognize these URLs and/or don't think they should be accessible, you can safely ignore these errors. If, however, you see URLs listed in the 'Not found' section that you recognize and would like crawled, we hope you find the 'Details' column helpful in identifying and fixing the errors. If you want get rid of these errors faster, you can 301 redirect incorrect or outdated URLs to the current version of that content, and/or you can contact sites that link to these URLs and ask them to update their links. Note that submitting a URL removal request will not remove these errors from your report. The URL removal tool removes URLs from Google's search results, it does not remove errors from your Webmaster Tools account. #404-errors-2 Q: I've corrected all the links pointing to pages that caused 404 errors. How long until the errors disappear from Webmaster Tools? Can I tell Google to update them? A: These errors will naturally disappear from your Webmaster Tools account after awhile, as we stop crawling pages that repeatedly return 404. As long as the 'Last found' date is staying the same, you no longer need to worry about these errors in your report. Note that submitting a URL removal request will not remove these errors from your report. The URL removal tool removes URLs from Google's search results, it does not remove errors from your Webmaster Tools account. #strange-words Q: Why do my Webmaster Tools stats show keywords that don't exist on my site? My site has nothing to do with porn or pharmaceuticals. A: This can happen if your site has been hacked and spam has been uploaded. Sometimes the spam consists of files and sometimes it's dynamically generated—for example, using your .htaccess file. Review your site for suspicious files, and check the .htaccess file for suspicious code. You may consider contacting your web host's technical support team for assistance if you believe your site has been hacked. This can also happen if you recently acquired your domain. You can use a tool like the Wayback Machine to check whether these keywords are coming from content that was previously on that domain. If this is the case, your current keywords should appear in Webmaster Tools once we've recrawled your site. Other forms of spam, such as comment spam from visitors, can appear in this report. Double-check areas of your site that accept user-generated content, and/or the output of any scripts that generate content automatically. #tsq Q: The Top Search Queries feature says that my site ranks #5 for [cookies], but when I search for [cookies] I see it ranking #8 (or I don't see it at all). What gives? A: Several things:
Q: Why am I still seeing "Data is not available at this time" in Webmaster Tools? I've been verified for months. A: Try looking at both the www and non-www versions of your site (e.g. www.example.com and example.com). If you're not looking at the same version as what's in Google's index, you may not see any data. Read this article for more details. If neither version of your site shows data, you may need to get the word out about your site to get more people visiting and naturally linking to it. That is, of course, after you've built a website that people will want to visit and link to. Webmaster Tools provides data based on factors like site visits and links to your pages. The more links to your site on the web, the greater the chances of Google's crawler stopping by for a visit. Once Google starts crawling your site more often you'll notice that Webmaster Tools will begin to show more detailed data. #robots-unreachable Q: I see "robots.txt unreachable" errors in Webmaster Tools. What does that mean? What should I do? A: If you have a robots.txt file, we'll obey the crawling rules listed in it. If /robots.txt returns a 404 (Not found) response on your site, we'll take that to mean that nothing on the site is blocked from crawling. But if we can't access your robots.txt file and we can't get a straightforward 404—that is, if we get an ambiguous response and can't tell whether or not a robots.txt file exists—we won't crawl any part of your site because we can't be sure that there isn't a file there asking us not to crawl certain parts of the site. If you experience this problem, you may want to contact your web host to investigate the issue. |