: Increase in 5XX errors and 404 errors on GWT, are we under attack? A lot of URLs are suddenly giving us 404s and 500s. On closer inspection, these URLs do not exist on our website and

@Alves908

There's two things happening here, so I'll address each:

404 from bad links - Issuing a valid 404 error is not a problem and will not cause you to lose Google ranks unless it's on a valid page. If you have domains link spamming you, you'll need to pull up your backlink profile and disavow them.

500 error from server - If a bad url is causing a 500 error, this is your server's fault. It should be able to handle random urls and issue either a 400 code (Bad Request) or a 404 (Page Not Found). Apache tends to handle this well, if you're on a Windows server you'll need to look up how to change the base settings to handle the broken urls.

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@Cofer257

Well there isn't much information to answer exactly. But here are the possible things which can cause.


You might have mis-configured dynamic pages in the webmasters
There might have been some pages with query string which may cause 404 and 500 errors
Someone might be trying to hack your site with random URL's


To Solve the 500 error issue make sure that you enable redirection on the webpage.

Also share us some of the sample URLs which might help in resolving the issue.

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