Huge number of crawl anomalies and 404s - non- existent urls

[nicola-1]

Hi there,

Our site was redesigned at the end of January 2020. Since the new site was launched we have seen a big drop in impressions (50-60%) and also a big drop in total and organic traffic (again 50-60%) when compared to the old site.

I know in the current climate some businesses will see a drop in traffic, however we are a tech business and some of our core search terms have increased in search volume as a result of remote-working.

According to search console there are 82k urls excluded from coverage - the majority of these are classed as 'crawl anomaly' and there are 250+ 404's - almost all of the urls are non-existent, they have our root domain with a string of random characters on the end. Here are a couple of examples:

root.domain.com/96jumblestorebb42a1c2320800306682

root.domain.com/01sportsplazac9a3c52miz-63jth601

root.domain.com/39autoparts-agency26be7ff420582220

root.domain.com/05open-kitchenaf69a7a29510363

Is this a cause for concern? I'm thinking that all of these random fake urls could be preventing genuine pages from being indexed / or they could be having an impact on our search visibility. Can somebody advise please?

Thanks!

[GFD_Chris]

From what I can tell, this probably isn't the reasons for the drops. I'd go back and ensure that any URLs that changed are 301 redirecting to the correct destination URL. I'd also ensure that no pages that were associated with high volume keywords no longer exist.

For your issue, Google is likely finding some broken URLs, possibly from your internal linking structure. Perform a crawl of the site and see if you can find "Inlinks" to those broken pages. If so, you can work with dev to eliminate the issue.

[nicola-1]

Thanks for your reply, would broken urls from the internal linking structure explain the random characters? e.g. root.domain.com/96jumblestorebb42a1c2320800306682

We've never had any page content/urls relating to 'jumblestore'.

Thanks!

[GFD_Chris]

It's tough to say without seeing the site. Overall it's unlikely if you don't use that string anywhere. We usually see it more for broken relative URLs. Maybe a third party site is using that string.

[nicola-1]

Thanks for your reply.

I’m new to the business and I’ve found that that the old website had a spam attack, all of these fake urls are from the old pages (as they have 301s).

There are 82,000 crawl anomalies from these fake/spam URLs and around 200 404s. None of the fake /spam urls have been indexed. Could this be having a negative effect of search visibility/DA or rankings?

Thanks!

[GFD_Chris]

Unlikely, as long as they're returning 404 errors you should be OK. Maybe update your disavow file and you should be good to go!