500 Internal Server Error Stops Googlebot Crawling My Site?

[internet-marketing-cr]

Hello Google Community members, thanks for any advice you can give me on this matter.

A website I am working on has a sitemap that was submitted to google, when I check google webmaster tools, it shows me a 500 internal error server for 45 ulr's including the home page.

I work doing some SEO for the site, specially link building.

Last December some changes where done by the IT Department to the site, I believe they change the back-end system of the site. When doing so they change the URL's, this was not having in account and it all generated broken links, we had top ten rankings on Google for our main keywords, and our site was last crawled on Dec 6 aprox. Since then I haven't seen any activity of the bots on the site, and we lost our rankings, google still displays some of the old pages of the site, we tried to fixed this redirecting the old pages to the new ones and some others where redirected to the home page. Also a sitemap was created for the site and submitted to Google last week, we get an OK on the sitemap but it shows a 500 internal server error for 45 URL's: "45 unrechable url's"

My question is: Does a 500 internal server error stops googlebot from crawling the site?
How do I check it, and how do I fix it?

[sheepcentral]

An error 500 is where the there is a error with the server and the software running on it, this could be something like a script time out or a bug in the backend that crashes the system. Check the URLs that give error 500s and get the IT dept. to fix them. If the content is still there and you can get links in to the new path of the pages then you will get your ranking back quite quickly.

[internet-marketing-cr]

Thanks Michael, I really appreciate your help.

Do you think that the 500 internal error server is stopping googlebot and others to crawl the site? The cache of the site is Dec 6/2006.

[megri]

You can file again sitemap and will get the results