Weird 404 Errors in Webmaster Tools

[Gamer07]

Hi,

In a regular check with Webmaster Tools, I have noticed a sudden increase in the number of "not found-404" errors. So I have been looking at them and noticed something weird has been going on.

There are well over 100 pages with 404-errors. The funny thing is, none of the ULR's are correct, For example, if the actual url is something like www.domain.com/latest-reviews , the 404-error points to a non-existent URL like www.domain.com/latest-re And when I checked where they were linked from, they are all from these spammy sites.

Anyone know what could be causing these links, why would anyone link on purpose to a non-existent page?

cheers,

[Thos003]

Google is finding text URLs on sites with limited characters. It's a google crawl problem.

SiteX refers to your article: http://yourdomain.com/blog/austin/steve-rides-to-the-alamo but they hit a charater limit of say 40 characters so they print the URL as "http://yourdomain.com/blog/austin/steve" but link it correctly. Even with a correct link, google will read the text and crawl it the way the text is printed, not linked. Or this happens if it's not linked at all and just a shortened text URL.

To sum it up... Google's got a problem and scrapper sites that chop up URLs are feeding the bots crap. If however the linking domain is a good one and you'd like to take advantage of this little error, then you create a redirect rule on your website for the 404 page.

[cprasad]

Hi,

When compare you give urls seems someone have posted your shortened urls. As an example on some websites they are shortening the actual url and using as Anchor text.

As an example http://www.seomoz.org/q/wei.. but it correctly has linked to the correct page. But some users with less knowledge, they just copy the Anchor text and post those at blog posts or some other places. Because that anchor text looks like an url.

And also it can be happen because of some other site's activity.

Anyway 404 not found errors will not affect your ranking. So you do not have to worry about this problem. Also suggest you to read this help document about 404 errors.

But I can see some another problem can happen because of this kind of activity. Because if you will get any traffic from a url like that with some suffixed which you have not created. As an example a url like this

www.domain.com/latest-reviews/?refferer=some_reffer

can be have a duplicate content issue. So, I strongly recommend to add rel canonical url in to your page.

Regards

Prasad

[Gamer07]

Thanks. I've got canonical. So I guess I don't have to do anything.

[Gamer07]

Thanks. I have actually been adding 301 redirects but didn't want to be spending too much time on it. Some of the links were not even linked. They were just text and Google still treated them as links.

[Alcospb]

I have alike problem: dozen of 404 errors in webmastertools like this:

http://domain.ru/ka...tino-akcia-trexkomnatnaja

http://domain.ru/Sa...e-novosti-za-oktyabr-2012

And there's not linkes to these pages from anywhere. Strange situation, cause i've lot's of pages with urls of different length, but not all of theme comes with error.