Sudden increase in 404 not found in GSC - Not my site pages

[mhansen]

Just like the title states. I was browsing GSC this morning and noticed several hundred new 404 not found index errors. Not a single one of the URL's has ever been on the website and these are obviously some kind of issue. Has anyone seen the same?

Whats also odd is that they COULD be url's that would commonly be found on the website. (topically relevant) I also don't see any of these odd links in the GSC link report or outside resources.

[lucy24]

Boilerplate reply: 99 times out of 100, messages from GSC can safely be ignored. Check to see that you haven't really done anything wrong, and then go about your business.

[Wilburforce]

Yes, same here, although not in that quantity. They're now listing loads of 404s and/or duplicate pages for e.g. https://www.example.com/sometopic.htm?iframe=true&width=100%&height=100% where no query page exists on the site, and where https://www.example.com/sometopic.htm is given as canonical.

Presumably they'll clean it up sooner or later.

[mhansen]

Thanks to you both for the reply. The odd factor is the topical relevance, some to URL's very close to the url of the page. It made me think of some kind of negative SEO link scheme or similar. Hopefully, Google will figure it out. we all know how wonky they've been recently.

[mhansen]

So, this continued to bother me and I investigated a bit further. What I found, is that all of these oddball 404 URL's, are actual pages on competitors websites. Competitors that have on occasion (often) seen a new page appear on my site, then within a few days, they have a very similar page on their site.

Today, I ran through roughly 30 of the 400 or so new 404 not found errors in GSC, and ALL 30 were to 3 different competitor pages, each owned by the same mega- media company. My conclusion is that they are referencing my site pages in some internal tool that Google is picking up on as they are drafting their content.

I can't provide specific examples without identifying both my own and the competitors pages. But the URL's are like this:

My site is format like this: mysite.com/specificword/my-url-title/
These 404's are: mysite.com/specificword/permalink-of-competitors-very-descriptive-page/

Basically, the mysite.com/specificword/ is a correct url on my site which leads to a main directory of topics.

[not2easy]

If the other site were showing your actual page via iframe, it would appear to be hosted on their site. If their iframe is removed then you might see 404s. Their URL for the iframed content might be different but similar. Your logs can show you if that was the case. It is a good practice to use preventive code (either as .js or in .htaccess) so they could not do that.

[mhansen]

The sites are not showing them in iframes, nor do they link to my website. FWIW, they are very much mainstream, popular websites with high authority. The url's that are sending the 404 on my site, are the actual url's of their content pages, minus my domain name and category structure in the url.

Ex:
My site is format like this: mysite.com/specificword/my-url-title/
These 404's are: mysite.com/specificword/permalink-of-competitors-very-descriptive-page/
Their web page is: theirsite.com/differentword/permalink-of-competitors-very-descriptive-page/

[not2easy]

In that case I would follow the advice from lucy24 and ignore Google's error(s).

[Wilburforce]

^^^ +1