If you are using google webmaster tools (and you should be), then you may have noticed a nifty new feature for new notifications if there is a change in the number of crawl errors that your site is experiencing.
On Monday July 26, 2010 Google revealed on their official webmaster central blog, that they have implemented a new notification feature.
When Googlebot crawls your website, it anticipatesthat the majority of URLs will return a 200 response code (which means all is OK), some a 404 response (meaning page is not found), some pages and content will be disallowed by robots.txt, etc. Whenever the Googlebot is unable to access your content, we show these detailswithin the Crawl errors section of Webmaster Tools (regardless if it is intentional or not). In their ongoing effort to assist webmasters, Google is now sending SiteNotice messages when they detect significant changes in the number of crawl errors impacting a website. These SiteNotice notificationsare supposed to alert you of potential error or crawl-related issues and offer a sample set of URLs for troubleshooting and fixing them.
A notification of a crawl error will look like the screen shot below.
You must have a verified site in Google Webmaster Tools 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.
Thanks for thinking of us Google. We need to make sure we are always nice to the GoogleBot.
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