404 Errors For Pages That Never Existed
-
I'm seeing a lot of 404 errors with slugs related to cryptocurrency (not my website's industry at all). We've never created pages remotely similar, but I see a lot of 404 errors with keywords like "bitcoin" and "litecoin". Any recommendations on what to do about this? Another keyword is "yelz".
It usually presents like .../yelz/-ripper-vs-steller/ or .../bitcoin-vs-litecoin/. I don't really even have the time to fix all the legitimate 404 errors, let alone these mysterious requests. Any advice is appreciated.
-
This is a great answer.
From the sounds of it OP has:
- A scraper site gone wrong, creating malformed links to your site
- Some kind of shady negative SEO attack trying to create garbage URLs on your site
- A data pollution attack trying to mess up your analytics
- A hack-attack
- Any mixture of the above
If a site has been hacked, sometimes it can take some proper dev work to pull it out at the roots. A hacked site is a liability to Google and Google don't like to rank hacked sites / content
I would suggest checking whether the site has been hacked with some urgency and back everything Gaston has said
-
Hi Brandon,
It's perfectly fine to have some 404s. Google Search Console reports them as a warning, as you might have some 404s that you aren't aware of.
Also, as you are having that much errors where your site has no business, I'd suggest you to check whether the site has been hacked or there is something going on there. You might want to check your website security and update your plugins and CMS, if that the case.Hope this helps.
Best luck.
Gaston
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Diminishing Returns for Links to an Unrelated Page
Suppose I have a new website about cars and I had created a page about something completely not-related - like cupcakes. However, I found that it was very easy to get high quality sites to link to the cupcakes page where as it was very difficult to get people to link to the homepage about cars. If my goal is to increase the SEO for the homepage (which again is related to cars), is there a point where additional high quality links to my cupcakes page is not useful for it anymore? What if I created another page - about frosted cupcakes - which was also easy to get high quality links to?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wlingke10 -
Pagination for Search Results Pages: Noindex/Follow, Rel=Canonical, Ajax Best Option?
I have a site with paginated search result pages. What I've done is noindex/follow them and I've placed the rel=canonical tag on page2, page3, page4, etc pointing back to the main/first search result page. These paginated search result pages aren't visible to the user (since I'm not technically selling products, just providing different images to the user), and I've added a text link on the bottom of the first/main search result page that says "click here to load more" and once clicked, it automatically lists more images on the page (ajax). Is this a proper strategy? Also, for a site that does sell products, would simply noindexing/following the search results/paginated pages and placing the canonical tag on the paginated pages pointing back to the main search result page suffice? I would love feedback on if this is a proper method/strategy to keep Google happy. Side question - When the robots go through a page that is noindexed/followed, are they taking into consideration the text on those pages, page titles, meta tags, etc, or are they only worrying about the actual links within that page and passing link juice through them all?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Pages linked with Spam been 301 redirected to 404\. Is it ok
Pl suggest, some pages having some spam links pointed to those pages are been redirected to 404 error page (through 301 redirect) - as removing them manually was not possible due to part of core component of cms and many other coding issue, the only way as advised by developer was making 301 redirect to 404 page. Does by redirecting these pages to 404 page using 301 redirect, will nullify all negative or spam links pointing to them and eventually will remove the resulting spam impact on the site too. Many Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Modi0 -
Benefit of using 410 gone over 404 ??
It seems like it takes Google Webmaster Tools to forever realize that some pages, well, are just gone. Truth is, the 30k plus pages in 404 errors, were due to a big site URL architecture change. I wonder, is there any benefit of using 410 GONE as a temporary measure to speed things up for this case? Or, when would you use a 410 gone? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
New sub-domain launches thousands of local pages - is it hurting the main domain?
Would greatly appreciate some opinions on this scenario. Domain cruising along for years, top 1-3 rankings for nearly all top non-branded terms and a stronghold for branded searches. Sitelinks prominently shown with branded searches and always ranked #1 for most variations of brand name. Then, sub-domain launches that was over 80,000 local pages - these pages are 90-95% similar with only city and/or state changing to make them appear like unique local pages. Not an uncommon technique but worrisome in a post Panda/Penguin world. These pages are surprisingly NOT captured as duplicate content by the SEOMoz crawler in my campaigns. Additionally about that same time a very aggressive, almost entirely branded paid search campaign was launched that took 20% of the clicks previously going to the main domain in organic to ppc. My concern is this, shortly after this launch of over 80k "local" pages on the sub-domain and the cannibalization of organic clicks through ppc we saw the consistency of sitelinks 6 packs drop to 3 sitelinks if showing at all, including some sub-domains in sitelinks (including the newly launched one) that had never been there before. There's not a clear answer here I'm sure but what are the experts thoughts on this - did a massive launch of highly duplicate pages coupled with a significant decrease in organic CTR for branded terms harm the authority of the main domain (which is only a few dozen pages) causing less sitelinks and less strength as a domain or is all this a coincidence? Or caused by something else we aren't seeing? Thanks for thoughts!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VMLYRDiscoverability0 -
Pages For Products That Don't Exist Yet?
Hi, I have a client that makes products that are accessories for other company's popular consumer products. Their own products on their website rank for other companies product names like, for made up example "2011 Super Widget" and then my client's product... "Charger." So, "Super Widget 2011 Charger" might be the type of term my client would rank for. Everybody knows the 2012 Super Widget will be out in some months and then my client's company will offer the 2012 Super Widget Charger. What do you think of launching pages now for the 2012 Super Widget Charger. even though it doesn't exist yet in order to give those pages time to rank while the terms are half as competitive. By the time the 2012 is available, these pages have greater authority/age and rank, instead of being a little late to the party? The pages would be like "coming soon" pages, but still optimized to the main product search term. About the only negative I see is that they'lll have a higher bounce rate/lower time on page since the 2012 doesn't even exist yet. That seems like less of a negative than the jump start on ranking. What do you think? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 945010 -
Herbal Viagra page same DA/PA as UC Berkeley??
Either there is some amazingly good SEO work going on here, or Google has an amazingly large hole in their metrics. http://nottowait.com/ http://www.ucdavis.edu/index.html The "nottowait" page has a PA of 85?! and a DA of 82?! The page is HORRIBLE. The page itself is an image of another page. The nav bar does not function, nor does any of the "click here" links. At the bottom there is a paragraph of keywords and broken english. This page is pure junk and should simply not have any value at all with respect to DA nor PA. It has a ton of incoming links from various sources which seem to be the source of all this value, which it passes on to other pages. This page really is an affront to the "content is king" concept. I suppose I should ask a question but all I can think of is, what is Matt Cutts' phone number? I want to ask him how this page has gotten away with being ranked so well for so long.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RyanKent0 -
From page 3 to page 75 on Google. Is my site really so bad?
So, a couple of weeks ago I started my first CPA website, just as an experiment and to see how well I could do out of it. My rankings were getting better every day, and I’ve been producing constant unique content for the site to improve my rankings even more. 2 days ago my rankings went straight to the last page of Google for the keyword “acne scar treatment” but Google has not banned me or given my domain a minus penalty. I’m still ranking number 1 for my domain, and they have not dropped the PR as my keyword is still in the main index. I’m not even sure what has happened? Am I not allowed to have a CPA website in the search results? The best information I could find on this is: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76465 But I’ve been adding new pages with unique content. My site is www.acne-scar-treatment.co Any advice would be appreciated.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | tommythecat1