Google Webmaster Tools “Page not found” Issue – Please help

[ddwebguru]

I have a website on website designing and related stuff.

http://www.webguru-india.com/webdesign.php

But there’s something rather strange going on in Google Webmaster reports. The reports keep on showing “Page not found” errors. For pages that don’t even exist. Although it’s a php page, new html pages are being created on their own. And the reports show these pages (which were never there) and report 404 errors.

Up till now there are ~6000 such errors.

Why is this happening? How can I stop this? Can someone help?

Here is a screenshot.

An advanced thanks!

 

[maaljasi]

Someone else probably previously owned the domain name and created the pages then.

 

[funchal]

One possible explanation for this is an incorrect hyperlink.

For example, someone else places a hyperlink to your website and creates it using a non-existing URL attached to your domain. When Googlebot finds the hyperlink, it will try to crawl the webpage it points to. As it does not exist, it will record a crawl error on your Webmaster Tools Account.

If you have 6,000 errors like this, I suggest someone might be using automated software to create IBLs to your website and either the software is duff or else the person using it has failed to enter the correct parameters.

 

[Retired_member41]

Hardly a web guru not knowing the answer???

 

[Edwin]

You can click on the links in the "Linked from" column to see where the referrals are coming from. If they're from other pages on your own site, you can update those and fix the bad links.

If they're external links on 3rd party sites, then see if they look like decent, legitimate sites or spammy ones. If they look legitimate, you could consider setting up 301 redirects for some of the "missing" pages to relevant real pages on your site.

 

[Nick11380]

If you have a serious 404 issue and you are faced with thousands of inbound links pointing to thousands of pages that don't exist then you may want to consider a catch-all 404 redirect (to the homepage). However this needs to be a last resort as pages that 404 can be very useful for discovering and fixing broken links as well as fixing usability issues. Bing (and now Google I believe) also don't like redirects cluttering up their sitemaps.

To spot internal broken links use a free program like Xenu Link Sleuth. Your site is a bit of a monster though so expect it to take 10-15 minutes.