404 Errors For Pages That Never Existed

[bcaples]

I'm seeing a lot of 404 errors with slugs related to cryptocurrency (not my website's industry at all). We've never created pages remotely similar, but I see a lot of 404 errors with keywords like "bitcoin" and "litecoin". Any recommendations on what to do about this? Another keyword is "yelz".

It usually presents like .../yelz/-ripper-vs-steller/ or .../bitcoin-vs-litecoin/. I don't really even have the time to fix all the legitimate 404 errors, let alone these mysterious requests. Any advice is appreciated.

[effectdigital]

This is a great answer.

From the sounds of it OP has:

1. A scraper site gone wrong, creating malformed links to your site
2. Some kind of shady negative SEO attack trying to create garbage URLs on your site
3. A data pollution attack trying to mess up your analytics
4. A hack-attack
5. Any mixture of the above

If a site has been hacked, sometimes it can take some proper dev work to pull it out at the roots. A hacked site is a liability to Google and Google don't like to rank hacked sites / content

I would suggest checking whether the site has been hacked with some urgency and back everything Gaston has said

[GastonRiera]

Hi Brandon,

It's perfectly fine to have some 404s. Google Search Console reports them as a warning, as you might have some 404s that you aren't aware of.
Also, as you are having that much errors where your site has no business, I'd suggest you to check whether the site has been hacked or there is something going on there. You might want to check your website security and update your plugins and CMS, if that the case.

Hope this helps.
Best luck.
Gaston