I am getting "not found" errors in my google webmaster tools for pages that are not even on my sitemap any longer (I'm guessing thats why they are errors). They use to exist but I renamed them a while back and recreated my sitemap. Is it just taking google a while to fetch a new sitemap from my site?

Originally Posted by Rhinohd

Is it just taking google a while to fetch a new sitemap from my site?

Obviously takes several days, but sometimes can be several weeks...

Google crawl everything from your site unless you use robots.txt to block some of the files...

If you have outside backlinks to your website then... Google will report that stuff as 404 as well.

Originally Posted by Rhinohd

I am getting "not found" errors in my google webmaster tools for pages that are not even on my sitemap any longer (I'm guessing thats why they are errors). They use to exist but I renamed them a while back and recreated my sitemap. Is it just taking google a while to fetch a new sitemap from my site?

Have you verified it or not.If yes then please wait for some time.You can do one more thing, just create some quality backlinks for those pages. It also helps in crawling

Just wait and not worry about it.

things I do in this situation.
I use 301 redirect for the not found pages and request for removal

Michelle My Belle is right

It will be automatically removed in almost 1 month.

or maybe not!