?goto urls - where are they coming from?

[coachm]

In webmaster tools I'm seeing hundreds of bad links that contain ?goto at the end. I have no idea where they are coming from, but it's screwing up my Google tools reporting.

Anyone know the source, and how to prevent them (I've already set up 410 redirects for any url with the goto command).?

[lucy24]

I've already set up 410 redirects

I hope you meant to say 410 Gone. Although it isn’t literally accurate--that is, you didn’t formerly have the URLs and then remove them--this is actually not a bad approach. It saves the server the trouble of looking for the file (or building a page, if it's a dynamic site), and G### tends to stop requesting 410s faster than 404s.

Most of the time it isn't worth trying to figure out where G gets its nonexistent URLs. If it were bing, I’d hypothesize that they glitched and attached someone else's URLpaths to your hostname; for some reason they’re especially prone to this. You've done the important thing, which is to ensure that the gotos don't comefrom (haha) anything you did. Also check your site logs to make sure you aren't getting any human requests for these bad URLs. Sometimes social media will attach an inexplicable query to links--think fbclid--and then you can decide what to do with them. But this isn't likely to be the case with hundreds of URLs all over the site.