Keep getting random broken links pointed at our website

[adamlcasey]

Over the past 6 months I've noticed an increase of 404 errors being picked up by Google Webmaster Tools.

When I look at the errors table and review these errors the links are invariable made up likes being generated from what looks like scraper sites or sites with search results embedded into them.  Below are some examples of them.

Broken Link                                           URL Generating the Link

www.mysite.com/rwickenhauser      http://www.webstatsdomain.com
www.mysite.com/guest                       http://www.webstatsdomain.com
www.mysite.com/windows                 http://www.webstatsdomain.com
www.mysite.com/..app                        http://213.174.143.40/
www.mysite.com/ht..                            http://de.aguea.com/

None of these pages exist on our website.
So do I need to setup redirects for these or can they be ignored?

[Marcus_Miller]

Nope, ignore them, if they are low quality scraper sites or other garbage.

Consider how these sites look to Google - tons of crappy content, tons of outbound broken links etc. Not easy to discount these and if they are pointing at pages that don't exist, it is not exactly manipulative and any value they would have passed would be lost in a 404 shaped hole anyhow.

Only thing I would consider doing is always using a full link in your content, that is including the domain rather than site relative with the root slash (/).

so,

http://www.mysite.com/category/page.html

rather than

/category/page.html

Then, scraped links should work - not that they will do you any benefit but you never know.

Hope that helps!
Marcus