Recent Webmaster Tools Glitch Impacting Site Quality?

[cbubinas]

The ramifications of this would not be specific to myself but to anyone with this type of content on their pages...

Maybe someone can chime in here, but I'm not sure how much if at all site errors (for example 404 errors) as reported by Google Webmaster Tools are seen as a factor in site quality, which would impact SEO rankings. Any insight on that alone would be appreciated.

I've noticed some fairly new weird stuff going on in the WMT 404 error reports. It seems as though their engine is finding objects within the source code of the page that are NOT links but look a URL, then trying to crawl them and reporting them as broken.

I've seen a couple different of cases in my environment that seem to trigger this issue.

The easiest one to explain are Google Analytic virtual pageview Javascript calls where for example you might send a virtual pageview back to GA for clicks on outbound links. So in the source code of your page you would have something like:

onclick="<a class="attribute-value">_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outboundclick/www.othersite.com']);</a> 

Although this is obviously not a crawl-able link, sure enough Webmaster Tools now would be reporting the following broken page with a 404:

www.mysite.com/outboundclick/www.otherwite.com

I've seen other such cases of thing that look like URLs but not actual links being pulled out of the page source and reported as broken links.  Has anyone else noticed this? Do 404 instances (in this case false ones) reported by Webmaster Tools impact site quality rankings and SEO?

Interesting issue here, I'm looking forward to hear some people's thoughts on this.

Chris