> Hi everyone, new to the group, thanks for having me  :D

> I'm getting some strange behavior from the Google Webmaster Tools
> Crawl Errors and I was hoping someone can help me out.

> Google is reporting many 404 errors for my site for pages that don't
> exist anymore due to site structure changes. About 6 months ago, I
> changed from html to php and also changed the naming convention to use
> "-" instead of "_" word separator. The structure changed drastically
> enough that I could not simply use htaccess for rewrite rules. So I
> did some research and people said that after a while of reading 404
> errors, google would drop the pages. Well, here we are 6 months later,
> google keeps re-indexing the bad pages!

> Here's one specific example:

> Bad page:
> http://infrared.com/applications/preventative_maintenance.html (has
> not existed since about 04/30/09

> Pages that link to
> http://infrared.com/applications/preventative_maintenance.html
> :
> URL     Discovery Date
> http://www.infrared.org/applications/preventative_maintenance.html
> Sep 23, 2009
> http://infrared.com/    Jan 15, 2009

> The strange thing here is that
> http://www.infrared.org/applications/preventative_maintenance.html
> HAS NEVER had a link to
> http://infrared.com/applications/preventative_maintenance.html

> Whats more is that http://infrared.com/ has been re-indexed several
> times and still this error shows.

> I have also used googles manual link removal tool on this link, it
> said "removed" but it still shows up in crawl errors...

> Other strange Errors: This one was just discovered 6 days ago

> Bad page listed in crawl errors (returns 404 header):
> http://infrared.com/index.htm

> Pages that link to http://infrared.com/index.htm:
> URL     Discovery Date
> http://twitter.com/infraredinc  Oct 2, 2009   <-- link to
> http://infrared.com/index.htm is NOT on this page!
> http://twitter.com/InfraredInc  Jun 20, 2009  <-- link to
> http://infrared.com/index.htm is NOT on this page!
> http://www.infrared.com/        Oct 16, 2009  <-- link to
> http://infrared.com/index.htm
> is NOT on this page!
> http://j.yofsarseo.com/km       Aug 17, 2008  <-- returns server not found
> http://infrared.com/site_map.htm        Nov 19, 2006  <--This page DOES
> NOT
> EXIST! Returns 404 header

> I know these pages are returning proper headers from the header addon
> for firefox.. but just to show you i've pasted in one of the results.

> http://infrared.com/site_map.htm

> GET /site_map.htm HTTP/1.1
> Host: infrared.com
> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:
> 1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
> Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/
> *;q=0.8
> Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
> Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
> Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
> Keep-Alive: 300
> Connection: keep-alive
> Cookie: __utma=25287781.185060607.1256079877.1256591154.1256594959.7;
> __utmz=25287781.1256079877.1.1.utmcsr=(direct)|utmccn=(direct)|utmcmd=
> (none); __utmb=25287781.7.10.1256594959; __utmc=25287781

> HTTP/1.x 404 Not Found
> Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:38:00 GMT
> Server: Apache
> Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=99
> Connection: Keep-Alive
> Transfer-Encoding: chunked
> Content-Type: text/html

> Please help!  I think my site is being heavily penalized by these "bad
> links"