Google bot creating 404 pages

[morphed]

Hi,

My first (of hopefully many) post to Webmaster World.

I've recently noticed we've been getting a few 404 errors on our site from Googlbot, it's a relatively new domain and is deffo sandboxed at the mo.

The pages that are being accessed are deff random pages and certainly don't exist anywhere on the site, nor would they be inbound links to the site since we've not proactively started to market the site just yet.

Has anyone else noticed this kind of activity from Google?

Couple of examples below:

http://www.example.com/hjjvcjsvhssgj.html
IP 66.249.66.38

http://www.example.com/hldmnwaepwqgx.html
IP 66.249.65.69

Cheers

[edited by: tedster at 10:51 pm (utc) on Dec. 12, 2006]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]

[tedster]

Hello morphed, and welcome to the forums.

Googlebot does test sites to see how they handle URLs that are errors. As long as your server is responding with a 404 http header, there's no problem for you. Some domains have improperly configured their custom error page and return a 302 or even a 200 response code, and googlebot needs to know this to try to make sense of the site.

[morphed]

Thanks Tedster,

Makes sense, as i'd recently uploaded and submitted my sitemap and received a msg to verify via META rather than HTML page as my 404 pages will return 200 as they return an ASP page to email me referrer / requested page etc for monitoring purposes.

Cheers