Can the Google Webmaster Tools API be used to automate fixing URL Page Not Found Errors?

Question

If I go into Google Webmaster Tools, and click Health->Crawl Errors, I noticed that our site has about 1,045 Not Found errors.

Each of these errors can be fixed manually by:

1. filtering through the list to find the specified error that has been needs to be fixed, and clicking on it.
2. In the resulting dialog clicking the Fetch as Google link,
3. Clicking Fetch
4. And finally, clicking submit the index (provided there are enough fetches remaining to do so), and then marking it as fixed.

Since there are about 1,000 errors to fix, doing this manually seems a bit out of the question.
(Note: I didn't have anything to do with it but the site was migrated before the content causing the errors.)

I'm aware that it is possible to retrieve a list of site errors, but that's really only half the battle. I looked over the APIs and didn't really find a way to use the Webmaster Tools API to mark errors as fixed.

Answer 1

Marking errors as "fixed" is perfectly possible with this API call:

https://developers.google.com/webmaster-tools/search-console-api-original/v3/urlcrawlerrorssamples/markAsFixed

So you can easily automate this by e.g. …

• fetching the crawl error sample (1000 max.)
• checking the given URLs
• marking working URLs as fixed via API

Keep in mind: Crawl error information is updated about once a day. So if there are more than 1000 errors and half of them get marked as fixed, new data that was not in the sample before will likely roll in after a day has passed.

Answer 2

I'm not sure what your question is, as I just successfully tested removing all errors (4 in my case) which was possible with just a few clicks. If the errors keep reappearing you might want to take a look at where the invalid URLs are linked from: if it's internal stuff, you should fix those links, and if it's external links you should either add redirects to the updated/moved pages, or ask the external web site(s) to update their links to your site.