Explanation for strange AV path requests?

ie /kjhgdkjhf1goifj2lktjelj34knfhjguih8bbj/index.html

[TallTroll]

Having seen that strange request, I had a shufty round thwe Web and found a possible explanation [leekillough.com].

As the information provided by our crawl engineers, this is for the soft 404 scrub that we are doing on hosts now. It is under our control. We know that the works leave the strange path as "/kjhgdkjhf1goif ...."

Nice that they are trying to clean up. Bad that they can't do it without generating more rubbish

[Brett_Tabke]

Looks to me like they are comparing 404's for dupes?

There are so many sites today that are not returning real 404's and instead returning other pages, that they have to intentionally create 404's inorder to have something to compare it too.