404s keep growing in search console

[Arturo99]

Hi
My 404s count in search console continually grows with URLs NOT in my database or sitemap
There are no injections. These have been checked with several scanners with 2 different hosting companies
(I tried moving host)
I also used a URL bulk removal tool to remove those 404.
Some are removed but within days the count starts to increase again

Any suggestions?
Thanks
Art

[not2easy]

Are these 404 URLs showing your domain as the source or are these links from other sites to pages supposedly on your site?

There are ways to help Google understand your concerns and remove these from their index. The best tools for this are not the commercial tools and apps out there, but the tools available within your GSC. A guide for the problem can be found here: [support.google.com...]

If the offending URLs are coming as links to your site, there is not much you can do to prevent it. I think you know that as long as the bogus links return a 404 you are doing what can be done. Trying to deal with them is an ongoing effort but you should also know that Google understands this situation and your site is not penalized for returning a 404 for pages that do not exist. It might seem to be your problem, but it is not and Google routinely removes URLs that return a 404. I've seen thousands show up and then disappear with no action from me at all.

[lucy24]

Stock reply: 99 times out of 100, problems reported in GSC can simply be ignored. You’ve already done the one thing you needed to do, which is to verify that there is nothing actually wrong on your site. If GSC has nothing better to do than report nonexistent issues, that’s their problem, not yours.

[Arturo99]

ok, thaks for the answers. I had thought at was causing my drop in rankings.
I can cross that one off.

[phranque]

on a properly configured site there is an infinite number of URLs that will generate a 404.

[tangor]

To me ... a 404 is showing the server is doing it's job: The file does not exist. Pretty simple.

On the other hand, if certain ips, etc. continually request the same garbage on a daily basis they get my 403 (via .htaccess) since that file is only 228 bytes compared to my more user friendly 404 at 2,800 bytes. Saving bandwidth.

[Kendo]

Getting links indexed is not as difficult as it should be. I am finding that mistyped and broken urls that would be 404s on my site have been added to G's index... I noticed that they index every url typed into Chrome a long time ago. Looks like they still do it, which is why I make a point of never testing anything new/private while using Chrome.