: Fake links cause crawl error in Google Webmaster Tools Google reported Crawl Errors last week on my largest site though Webmaster Tools. Here is the message: Google detected a significant
Google reported Crawl Errors last week on my largest site though Webmaster Tools. Here is the message:
Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that
return a 404 (Page Not Found) error. Investigating these errors and
fixing them where appropriate ensures that Google can successfully
crawl your site's pages.
The Crawl Errors list is now full of hundreds of fake links like these causing 16,519 errors so far:
Note that my site does not even have a search.html and is not related to any of the terms shown in the above image. Inspecting sources for one of those links, I can see this is not simply an isolated source but a concerted effort:
Each of the links has a few to a dozen sources all from different, seemingly unrelated sites.
It is completely baffling as to why would someone to spending effort doing this. What are they hoping to achieve? Is this an attack?
Most importantly:
Does this have a negative effect on my side? Could it negatively impact my ranking?
If so, what to do about it?
The few linking pages I looked at are full of thousands of links to tons of sites and have no contact information and do not seem like the kind of people who would simply stop if asked nicely!
According to Google Webmaster Tools, these errors have appeared in a span of 11 days. No crawl errors were being reported previously.
More posts by @Odierno851
2 Comments
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There's 2 possibilities,
You Paid Someone
You paid someone to make you some links and they are have used automated tools without any care in the world where your links end up and what anchors they use for these links.
Someone Hates You
The 2nd possibility is that someone is trying to damage your rankings by backlinking to your site from hundreds to thousands of unworthy site. This can ultimately damage your rankings, however Matt Cutts the web spam leader at Google has said its not possible for others to hurt your rankings yet its possible for someone who's the webmaster to hurt their own? it's very contradiction information and my personal belief is that someone linking to you in the form you have listed in screenshots will not help one bit.
Google uses an every day algorithm which effects rankings on links but they also have a scheduled algorithm update that they run 2-6 times a year called 'Penguin' This is ultimately what you should research. Google also released a disavowed tool that you can tell Google to remove these links from GWT and from having ranking factors on your site, many people have reported this tool as fail and have not had any return in rankings after Penguin.
I think it could have a small negative effect on your site as it is obviously coming from spam bots, probably looking to show up in referral logs among other things. I don't think it is an attack, but more of a failed blackhat SEO method.
My first suggestion would be to block search.html in robots.txt and request the removal of the URL through Webmaster Tools since you said you don't have any content there.
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