Are lots of links from an external site to non-existant pages on my site harmful?
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Google Webmaster Tools is reporting a heck of a lot of 404s which are due to an external site linking incorrectly to my site.
The site itself has scraped content from elsewhere and has created 100's of malformed URLs.
Since it unlikely I will have any joy having these linked removed by the creator of the site, I'd like to know how much damage this could be doing, and if so, is there is anything I can do to minimise the impact?
Thanks!
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Thanks for this - definitely some food for thought regarding how we handle 404s in general...
I am more worried about search engines than humans from this type of thing (we have had no referrals from this dodgy site) so would be interested to see if you still think a 301 is the best way to go since the link text may not be appropriate to our site (and perhaps this would be worse?!).
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404s are something do be avoided as it makes your website look 'abandoned' in a way. If possible, I would set up 301s or similar to send these links to your main website rather than to 404 pages. You could also create a nice 404 site.
See these for more information:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/personalizing-your-404-error-pages
A bit of work can go a long way.
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