: Weird 404 crawl errors in Google webmaster tools If anyone can help, I'd be very grateful! We're getting strange domains coming up in Google webmaster tools - they seem to be breeding. When

@Odierno851

OK, I think we may have found the answer. Google was reporting hundreds of ASPX pages as 404 errors, and we assumed that this was what was going wrong. In fact, this was what was going right. The real problem was that when anyone went to an HTML page, IIS was configured to show a different page, which returned a 200 error.

So if a dodgy link existed on an outside side to a Wise Owl page which didn’t exist, this linked page would be treated by Google as genuine, as would any pages linked to from it. So the number of pages indexed by Google but actually not existing would have grown exponentially over time, which eventually led to our penalisation.

Still not sure if this is correct, but it sounds plausible. We’ve now removed the 404 page from IIS, and we’ll see what happens!

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@Carla537

Let's analyse your examples. All three have on thing in common: /enquiry/frmenquiry.aspx. That makes it worth googling for. One of the results is this question, but there are several others, a few of which actually display the HTML source code instead of the rendered HTML. That is a classic attack vector for compromising web sites.

I would surmise that your site is feeling the effects of a badly configured vulnerability scan. It seems that the scanner has a number of URL and he just exchanges the domain, then scans for them. And since Google found them, the links themselves must have been available somewhere, sometime, maybe on the scanner's website.

Have you found any of these 404 occurrences in your error log? They should provide additional information as to when and where this event started.

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@Murphy175

This is the case of URL masking, in simple words your site has been attacked with malicious codes, so your site is showing the url of other sites in your url.

You have to do the fresh installation of your site.

The best way is to take the backup of your database and then go ahead with the fresh installation.

Note: Try not to use any code files from the previous installed system other than images, for the malicious codes are often hidden in the code files.

I too have faced the similar issue. For more info check the below link, this might will help
www.willmaster.com/library/web-development/URL-masking.php

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