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Noah
Noah
Jan 19, 2025, 10:59 AM
Forwarded from another channel:
Forwarded thread from another channel:
David Gutierrez
David Gutierrez
Jan 6, 2025, 11:10 AM
If 404 Validation is labeled as "failed", what does that actually mean? I'm not sure if it's saying it failed because it's still finding 404's, or if it failed (for some other reason) and can't run the validation for the rest of the "pending" status urls.
Shawn Huber
Shawn Huber
Jan 6, 2025, 11:11 AM
Yes, that means that some URLs are still failing when Google retries them. You can see the second tab "Failed" with the count of 5 that shows you which ones failed when they tried.
David Gutierrez
David Gutierrez
Jan 6, 2025, 11:36 AM
What does all the pending ones mean? Will they still get validated, or does failed mean they won't check those because validation is over (due to failure)
Shawn Huber
Shawn Huber
Jan 6, 2025, 11:37 AM
Means they stopped validating until you fix the issue
Tony McCreath
Tony McCreath
Jan 6, 2025, 1:41 PM
Recent comments from @John Mueller on this:
Explore this conversation and more from the SEO community
Reddit: johnmu's comment on
David Gutierrez
David Gutierrez
Jan 6, 2025, 1:48 PM
interesting timing. Thanks for sharing. I'm still a bit confused though... I can't grasp why the validation fails when there are items in "pending". If it is "pending", does that mean they will continue to be validated even though validation has failed? That reddit post makes that seem so.
Shawn Huber
Shawn Huber
Jan 6, 2025, 2:00 PM
In my experience they stop validating because they are assuming if there are failures in the few they inspected then the rest are likely going to fail.
David Gutierrez
David Gutierrez
Jan 6, 2025, 2:01 PM
yeah I think you're right @Shawn Huber.
John Mueller
John Mueller
Jan 6, 2025, 2:37 PM
It'll fail when it finds some that aren't "fixed". For a 404, "fixed" could mean "it's really 404, just deal with it", "redirecting", or "200 ok" - imo that one's not something that's useful to validate-fix on, since some pages will be 404 on purpose, and that's not a problem. Probably we shouldn't show "validate fix" for 404s, but generally we try to keep the same UI across elements. For other indexing issues (say 5xx errors) or broken structured data, it's a lot more straightforward: you tried, but got it wrong; a fix is easy & objectively verifiable. Also, "verify fix" does nothing in search, it's really only for your information in search console - in practice what happens is it samples a small set of URLs, tries them out, and if that looks good, it'll track the rest.
Bill Scully
Bill Scully
Jan 6, 2025, 3:29 PM
@John Mueller, I have always wondered... if you don't validate a report, would crawling treat the 404 URLs differnt then 200s? Do they keep crawling 404s, and until they stop at some point?
Paul Thompson
Paul Thompson
Jan 9, 2025, 5:58 PM
Jsut went thourgh this exat scenario an a smaller scale helping @Iquo Inyang here. So here's my assessment.
She had a smaller list of 404 that were submitted for validation. GSC returned a result that the first 5 tested had failed. And it left the rest of the list in "pending" status for over three weeks.
So my assumption is when you submit a 404 for validation, GSC expects that something other than a 404 should be returned when retested. Otherwise, why would you be re-validating?
When it reaches 5 tests and they all fail, it puts the rest of the list into pending mode and stops trying. (Interesting that in both our cases, it quit after exactly 5 errors, despite huge difference in the number of URLs submitted.)
In our case, the redirects that were to solve the 404s had gotten lost in the shuffle and hadn't yet been implemented, so the validation failures were totally legit.
The needed redirects have been implemented and she's going to resubmit for validation. Expect those will go through fine. We're also submitting a temporary XML sitemap of the 404'd URLs to help G discover them more quickly.
So I'd strongly suggest, if you haven't already, that the list of 1326 404d URLs be run through Screaming Frog in List mode to confirm that they are all in fact redirecting properly first.
So my experience (with a sample size of 1) indicates - the failed status says "GSC expected a change in status from 404 to something else but the new crawl still returned the 404 so whatever fix you think you implemented isn't working".
Shawn Huber
Shawn Huber
Jan 9, 2025, 6:00 PM
That's great you were able to help her get that fixed!
Bill Scully
Bill Scully
Jan 9, 2025, 6:23 PM
I’ve experience with resubmitting a hreflang site map that gets almost all pages immediately recrawled, so resubmitting the fixed 404 pages in a sitemap sounds like a good idea.

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