Q: Most of my 404s are for bizarro URLs that never existed on my site. What’s up with that? Where did they come from?
A: If Google finds a link somewhere on the web that points to a URL on your domain, it may try to crawl that link, whether any content actually exists there or not; and when it does, your server should return a 404 if there’s nothing there to find. These links could be caused by someone making a typo when linking to you, some type of misconfiguration (if the links are automatically generated, e.g. by a CMS), or by Google’s increased efforts to recognize and crawl links embedded in JavaScript or other embedded content; or they may be part of a quick check from our side to see how your server handles unknown URLs, to name just a few. If you see 404s reported in Webmaster Tools for URLs that don’t exist on your site, you can safely ignore them. We don’t know which URLs are important to you vs. which are supposed to 404, so we show you all the 404s we found on your site and let you decide which, if any, require your attention.
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