Why ask for none?

Pardon my newbie tendencies

[EarleyGirl]

'Tis a strange day indeed. In my logs I'm finding visitors referred from a search engine and then a few seconds or so later they request this: mydomain.com/none with "none" being a non-existent page bringing up a 404. Why am I seeing this in my logs? Is it the result of a toolbar? Who would purposefully request a non-existent page other than a spider/bot or someone with malicious intent? I have seen this now several times today in my logs from completely different IPs. Earlier today I found it from visitors not referred by a search engine but now I'm seeing both. What gives?

[grelmar]

Is the word in the URL actually the word "none," or is it some specific filename that doesn't exist?

Couple of reasons you might be seeing this:

1. SE Bots might be pinging for files they know don't exist just to check the configuration of your 404 page, to reference it against their crawls, so that they know a 404 when they see it and don't accidentally index it.

2. Scumware bots crawl around looking for specific filenames that are part of certain BBS and CMS packages that are known to be weak/crackable. The SEs know these filenames, and generally don't index them anymore, as a part of an overall strategy to prevent large scale attacks. The only way to discover these pages anymore, for the scumware set, is to create their own bots that crawl domains looking for those specific filenames.

Or any one of a bazillion randomn reason why this might be happening. Those are just two possibles.

[EarleyGirl]

Thanks, grelmar. I appreciate the reply!