indyank - 3:48 am on Mar 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

crobb305, I too saw these strange 404s in GWT for urls that never existed on the affected domain.I gave the example in some thread here.However, I haven't addressed them with 301s as these pages never existed on the domain.Are other sites affected by this update seeing this?

Odd characters are being put into the URLs that Googlebot tries to crawl, thereby rendering 404. For example, www.example.com/&837262intendedpage.htm I don't know how to eradicate these if they are being "discovered" on search portals.

I also see those 404s for urls that you described above.These also happen when those incoming links are from pdf files.I used to redirect them to the correct urls as those pages existed on the domain and the errors are caused by malformed incoming urls in third party sites.

But I am now thinking to remove the redirects for those odd urls, as google might be considering them negatively.

Can someone help me on this? Should I retain those redirects for those strange urls that crobb305 has explained or should I be removing them? I added those 301s after I saw them in GWT report on crawl errors.