Fix or Block Webmaster Tools URL Errors Not Found Linked from a certain domain?
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RE: Webmaster Tool "Not Found" URL Errors are strange links from webstatsdomain.com
Should I continue to fix 404 errors for strange links from a website called webstatsdomain.com or is there a way to ask Google Webmaster Tools to ignore them?
Most of Webmaster Tools "URL Not Found errors" I find for our website are from this domain. They refer to pages that never existed. For example, one was to www.mydomain.com/virtual.
Thanks for your help.
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If someone is linking to a URL on your domain that doesn't exist, go first see if you can find the link. See where it is on their site and what the anchor text is and what context it appears in. Then determine the page they either meant to link to or something close topically. I would then redirect the bad URL they are linking to over to a URL that works so that I can maintain the link juice.
If the links are coming from an undesirable place then you can always block the bad URL they point to in your robots.txt file and disavow the link with Google's disavow tool.
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I get a lot of those as well. Not sure where they get their information from but they append some of the strangest things to the end of our domain URLs that isn't even vaguely based off of real pages. In their case, I leave the 404s alone as they tend to vanish in a short amount of time.
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With Open Site Explorer, I checked webstatsdomain.com where the goofy links originate.
Its Domain Authority is 67/100 and Page Authority is 72/100.
From your answer, it sounds like it is worthwhile to redirect it to the closest page.
Thanks!