Google Sitelinks

[ahamill]

We have an e-commerce site that has about 50k pageviews of our main shop page every week.  However in our Google sitelinks we have one for 'Shop'. However, for the Shop sitelink Google is linking to a random URL that we have never & would never use as a URL and not to our Shop page.  I can't work out why Google would pick up this random url as we have so many links etc to the main shop page.  Why are they not linking to the right page?

I have blocked that url in webmaster tools and done a redirect but I want to understand why it happened in the first place. It included 'swedish+fish' so it seems weirdly spammy?!

Any thoughts would be really helpful (and I am only mildly techy).

Many thanks

[PracticeFusion]

Well, I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is that I can't be TOO much help. The good news is that you're not alone.

Just last week I wrote a post on the SEOmoz blog about this exact issue. You can check it out here.

If you can figure out exactly why it happened then definitely let me know and I'll give you a big high five.

[ahamill]

This post is deleted!

[PracticeFusion]

Oh wow. When you said "non-existent" I didn't know you meant literally. That's crazy. Sorry I couldn't be more help.

[Dr-Pete]

It's a bit hard to tell without seeing the specific case, but the first thing that comes to mind is a ton of links to that URL - either bad internal links or inbound/external links created accidentally or maliciously. If Google sees the URL linked to prominently, they could decide to treat that URL as legitimate (even without a page).

Does the bad URL 404 correctly? It's possible the URL is out there but it's resolving with a 200 or a weird redirect, and Google isn't recognizing that the page doesn't exist. One of the first things I'd do is run a header checker against the bad URL and see how it's resolving. For example, a tool like:

http://tools.seobook.com/server-header-checker/

[ahamill]

Aha - thank you so much.  I thought I had already checked my internal links but double-checked again after your response and you were completely correct.  There was a horrendous error with our code that led an example link being added to every page rather than the correct one.  Thank you helping me look in the right direction to find the solution!