Help with strange 404 Errors.

[MikePatch]

For the most part I have never had trouble tracking down 404's. Usually it's simply a broken link, but lately I have been getting these strange errors

http://gridironexperts.com/”http%3A/www.nfl.com/gamecenter?game_id=29528&season=2008&displayPage=tab_gamecenter/

1. What does; %C2%94 repersent?
2. The error always points to NFL.com, but we don't link to them...like ever?
3. Can I just 404: http://gridironexperts.com/”/   to fix the problem, as all 404's start with this weird %C2%94 error.
4. Is this error even on my site? Is in the backend...virus?

thanks

-Mike

[Francisco_Meza]

You may want to check GWT under malware. That seems odd that you never link to NFL, but the 404 is coming from your site.

Check the source code of those particular pages that are giving the 404s. Check line by line for anything you don't recognize. Also, make SURE there aren't any .ru TLDs there.

When my site got attacked, my hosting company stepped up and did a scan of malware and they found severall things. So maybe your hosting company can do a scan for you.

[CleverPhD]

Hey there.  The %C2 %94 %3A are simply ASCII values of encoded versions of special characters in the URL.

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp

%3A is the same as a colon

%C2 is Â

%94 is "

This simply puts those characters in a format that is easier for the browser to read and then convert into a format it can use.

Couple of things to check on where this comes from.

Get a spider program and see if somewhere, waaay out there in the back ends of your content library that you have some crazy goofed up link that got planted here.  Find it an delete it

Other than that, somewhere out on the internets, as my developer likes to say, "A bunch of monkeys banged heads on keyboards"  There are site scrapers that do not do a good job and take your content and then repost it and they screw up all kinds of formatting and you end up with links like the above pointing to your site.  The spiders look for it and you get a 404.

I just did a Google search on

www.nfl.com/gamecenter?game_id=29528&season=2008&displayPage=tab_gamecenter/

and you get all kinds of random pages linking to that.

Here is what I would do.  You mention most errors start with

http://gridironexperts.com/”/

You can 301 all those to another page.  Or, show a simple helpful page for the user to navigate off of with a noindex, nofollow meta tag.  The noindex tag would get those pages out of the index at least and not show a 404 error.

[MikePatch]

cool that's what I was thinking. Thanks so much. awesome answer

you went above and beyond

[CleverPhD]

Thanks - please mark as answered and like if you please!

[MikePatch]

Actually. I tried to 301 direct http://gridironexperts.com/”/ to the home page and it didn't fix the 404's.

can you send me a link to that spider reference you mentioned

[CleverPhD]

Just to clarify.   404s dont always come from links on your site.  Often, these are links on other sites etc that Google has in its index that they found somewhere and are trying to see if the 404s dont work.

Not saying that it is not malware, but clarifying the angle on these.

[CleverPhD]

When you say it did not fix them, do you mean that the 301 was not working, or that the 404s did not go away in the GWT report?

You will not see an immediate change in GWT for those errors.  They may take 30-90 days to clear out.  If you have them fixed, you can mark them as such and then take the error out of your console.

As a part of the SEO Membership, check out the SEOMoz report for some option.  I have used Screaming Frog SEO spider with some success to look through my site and find random links.

P