Corey Roth [MVP]

I’ve seen a few people asking about this in the Crawl Logs and thought I would take a few minutes to address it.  First and foremost this is a warning and not an error message.  Sometimes when you receive this message, it is the crawler behaving normally.  Other times it is because of an issue.  I’ll first talk about when it is a normal behavior.  When an item is deleted, it is perfectly normal to see this in your logs the next time a crawl occurs.  This is simply indicating that SharePoint is removing the record from the search index.  If you see an occasional one of these, then you can assure your administrator that things are probably fine.

Other times it can indicate another issue.  In the situation where you already have your index built and your crawl log is filled with nothing but this warning, that is usually indicative of a problem (not to mention your index is empty).  Before you do anything, the first thing I always recommend is just try crawling again.  It might just fix it.  If it doesn’t then more than likely you have a permissions problem.  If you are dealing with a SharePoint content source, verify that the crawl account can still access SharePoint, the password hasn’t expired, it isn’t locked out, etc.  Get the credentials for your crawl account and actually make sure you can log into a SharePoint site.  While I am here, I’ll remind you again to never give this account administrator level privileges as it causes your search index to have deleted an unapproved files in it.  After you make any necessary changes, try to crawl again (twice if necessary) and see if that resolves your issue. 

If you are crawling a Business Data Catalog content source, make sure that the content access account has access to the BDC itself first by going to the Business Data Catalog permissions page on your SSP.  Then also verify that the content access account also has permissions to the BDC application itself as well as its child entities.  If you make any changes, be sure and crawl again.

If none of this has helped, my recommendation of course it to go to the 12 hive’s LOGS folder.  You will need to sift through this file and see if you can find anything potentially permissions related with Search.  Don’t follow any advice to reset your index unless absolutely necessary.  More than likely your index is already effectively reset and doing this probably won’t get you any where.  There are some other causes of this in your logs I am sure, but hopefully this will give you a good start in resolving this issue (if there is one to begin with).