Thousands of requests for non-existent page

[troyid]

Over the last year I have found these requests in my log files and I can't work out why.

67.159.45.133 - - [01/May/2009:20:14:03 -0500] "GET /webcams/935.html HTTP/1.1" 404 292 "http://www.domain.com" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)"

88.107.254.49 - - [01/May/2009:21:26:21 -0500] "GET /webcams/935.html HTTP/1.1" 404 292 "http://www.domain.com" "\xef\xbb\xbfMozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6"

This page does not exist and the ip address and domain name is always different. When I visit the domain name I can't see a link to my page.

[micron]

In most cases that I've encountered something similar, I have attributed it to either:

Referrer spam - www.domain.com is hitting your site in the hopes that the webmaster is reviewing incoming links. This is more likely the case if you have a non-404 response where the referrer may be published somewhere.

Vulnerability scans - Every day I encounter a huge number of scans over my site seeking out applications with known vulnerabilities. Due to the automated nature, most will result in 404 (particularly if you use a little "security through obscurity" and avoid common install directories). Generally, a search for the 404 page name (eg. /webcams/935.html) would reveal other public installs of this app, but it doesn't appear to be the case here.

Bad linking - Somewhere this deep link was posted incorrectly. Perhaps you could try using Google's "link:" to see if you can locate an instance of this link.

With the details you've provided (the fact that it's a 404 and the fact that the /webcams/935.html isn't a commonly known public app link), I'm less convinced that these are the likely reasons.