WMT reporting 404s from another site

[jrs79]

Google Webmastertools is reporting a few (maybe 10) 404s. The part that has me concerned is that the URLs are for a different website and it is not any website, but a website I know and this is on the same server.

Any help, insight, or thoughts are more

[not2easy]

Does the other website belong to you? Is it a subdomain?

[jrs79]

It does not belong me and it is not a subdomain. I am associated with the site (GA, AdWords,Servers, Etc). They are more or less client sites.

[aakk9999]

Do they share the same IP?

[not2easy]

Curious - Is there any chance that the other site may have somehow had canonical metatags to your domain's content? Built off a template and left the tags in place? Shared plugin settings?

[aakk9999]

So it appears this happened to me - I am guessing it could be the same problem.

We had hosting provider migrate a website from one server to another and 3 days later in WMT I am noticing lots of URLs that are reported as 404, but which look like they may belong to another website. I googled the root-relative URL reported in WMT and there it was, a valid URL belonging to another site (very reputable site, big brand but completely different industry).

Further checks showed that this other site is hosted by the same hosting provider, but they do not share IP. I am not sure whether they share physical server or cluster, but I suspect they might.

My current theory is that something for the moment went wrong with binding IP address to a physical webspace or something wrong with DNS propagation and that for a very short period of time the request for the client's site home page went to the webspace of that other website. So if Googlebot requested home page of the site we migrated, it probably got a home page of this other website, harvested all (root-relative) URLs and now is requesting one by one - which now return 404 as the correct webspace is being pointed to.

Interestingly, it is also majesticbot who also must have crawled the migrated site when it was returning wrong content because when I checked server logs, I can see googlebot and majesticbot requesting URLs whose "path" part belongs to that different website.

I have emailed hosting provider to see if they can recall what happened and I am waiting for a reply. In a meantime, Google is requesting non-existent URLs and is getting 404 back - WMT shows 58 such URLs.

[lucy24]

it is also majesticbot who also must have crawled the migrated site when it was returning wrong content because when I checked server logs, I can see googlebot and majesticbot requesting URLs whose "path" part belongs to that different website

Funny you should mention this, because lately I'm seeing tons of mj12 requests for
/directory/pagename.html
where this form has never, ever existed-- it's always been
/directory/subdir/pagename.html
with the exact number and arrangement of subdirs varying. You always need to consider the possibility that maybe their crawler just isn't very bright :(

[jrs79]

aakk9999 - Thanks for sharing. I may have experienced something similar.