I am seeing an unusual number of complaints around the reported 404 errors within Google Search Console reporting. This is specific to your URLs having /1000 appended to the end of the URL. Google is aware of the issue and is telling us to ignore them since the links go to 404 pages.
I was able to replicate it for this site, you can see, Google is showing 404 error reports for URLs that do not exist on the site, so it is accurate. But many of these URLs end in /1000 and tons of SEOs and site owners are asking - what is up with these /1000s.
Here is what I see:
Google's John Mueller replied to this issue saying "No need to disavow; it's probably just random spam." He also replied on LinkedIn saying, "You can ignore them. 404s are fine." Google has said 404s are fine in the past and that links pointing to 404 pages do not count anyway.
I spotted the complaints in the comments here and there are complaints about this on Reddit, LinkedIn and several on X.
Who else received GSC notifications about 404 errors, where the URLs end like "/1000"? I saw several cases over multiple domains over the weekend. Another SPAM issue by Google or just cruel requests?#seo #1000 #google #404 #gsc pic.twitter.com/jxPPYtGIV2
— Andor Palau (@andorpalau) January 15, 2024
Hey @JohnMu , are you aware of all the URLs ending with /1000 that are reported as 404-errors in the GSC? We can see this across multiple Domains (running on WP, AEM, FirstSpirit etc.). What´s going on there?
— Nicolas Sacotte (@nsacotte) January 15, 2024
My Google Search Console shows tons of 404 errors for URLs ending in "/1000", even though the original versions without "/1000" are working correctly. Should I ignore these errors? @johnmu #SEOCommunity #NeedHelp @glenngabe #SEO Thanks pic.twitter.com/kKcjfXZ00K
— Tahir Liaqat (@tahirliaqat01) January 15, 2024
In the comments, someone posted an example to sites linking to /1000:
When I checked some of the referring pages that link to my /1000 URLs that 404, they are mostly redirects that lead to porn and malware sites.
Have you seen this?
Forum discussion at Reddit.
Update on February 2, 2024: John Mueller from Google posted a more detailed response in this Reddit thread saying don't worry about it, these links do not help or hurt you. He wrote:
You can just ignore these. There's absolutely nothing you need to do about them. They have no negative (or positive!) effect on your site's SEO.I've seen threads where people robot them out (you can do that, it also does nothing, it just changes how they're reported in Search Console).
I've seen threads where people redirect them (you can do that, it also does nothing, there's no value to be gained from these links, and redirecting them elsewhere brings no effects either).
I've seen threads where people use the diavow links tool (you can do that, it also does nothing, and given the number of domains, it's a lot of useless work).
I've seen threads where people block those requests at a server level, 410, 403, 5xx, etc - (you can do that, it also does nothing here and at most changes how it's reported in Search Console, but you better not mess up and accidentally break your site's actual content because that's very easy to get wrong)
Google & the other search engines have a lot of practice dealing with random spammers & random link-spam. The web is full of weird & wonderful things, and full of so much useless spam. All search engines discard or de-prioritize a lot of junk in order to find the highlights that users want to find (and I hope your site is one of those highlights). Please have your site be one of the highlights of the web.
