How to handle broken links to phantom pages appearing in webmaster tools

[dancape]

Hi,Would love to hear different experiences and thoughts on this one.

We have a site that is plagued with 404's in the Webmaster Tools. A significant number of them have never existed, for instance affiliates have linked to them with the wrong URL or scraper sites have linked to them with a truncated version of the URL and an ellipsis eg;

/my-nonexistent...

What's the best way to handle these?

If we do nothing and mark as fixed, they reappear in the broken links report.

If we 301 redirect and mark as fixed they reappear.

We tried 410 (gone forever) and marking as fixed; they re-appeared.

We have a lot of legacy broken links and we would really like to clean up our WMT broken link profile - does anyone know of a way we can make these links to non extistent pages disappear once and for all?

Many thanks in advance!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I recommend checking the following:
Internal Links - you may have some links pointing to these pages. ScreamingFrog is a great tool for this.
Sitemap - you may have some errors in your sitemap.
Backlink audit - see if potentially these links are coming from other sites.
Canonical tags - maybe a page has a broken or wrong canonical tag.
Parameters - this will help you tell Google how to handle URLs with parameters.

Run through these resources and see if these help alleviate the problem. Let me know! Good luck!

[VicMarcusNWI]

What’s been working well for us is marking those errors as fixed and then asking Google to remove them from index. To do this, click on the Google Index menu in Webmaster Tools, then click on Remove URLs and create new removal requests for each URL you want Google to remove.

One caution – Don’t remove URLs you didn’t intend on removing! Double check everything before you submit removal requests to Google.

Vic

[dancape]

Great suggestion we'll try that thanks Vic.