Monday, July 26, 2010
When Googlebot crawls your site, it's expected that most URLs will return a 200
response code, some a 404 response, some will be disallowed by robots.txt, etc.
Whenever we're unable to reach your content, we show this information in the
Crawl errors
section of Webmaster Tools (even though it might be intentional and not actually an error).
Continuing with our effort to provide useful and actionable information to webmasters, we're now
sending SiteNotice messages when we detect a significant increase in the number of crawl
errors impacting a specific site. These notifications are meant to alert you of potential
crawl-related issues and provide a sample set of URLs for diagnosing and fixing them.
A SiteNotice for a spike in the number of unreachable URLs, for example, will look like this:
We hope you find SiteNotices helpful for discovering and dealing with issues that, if left unattended, could negatively affect your crawl coverage. You'll only receive these notifications if you've verified your site in Webmaster Tools and we detect significant changes to the number of crawl errors we encounter on your site. And if you don't want to miss out on any these important messages, you can use the email forwarding feature to receive these alerts in your inbox.
If you have any questions, please post them in our Webmaster Help Forum or leave your comments below.