Lots of 404 Page Errors

Question

Does anyone know why Craft CMS generates continual 404 errors for things like the following:

• ?p=1504
• tag/tag.js
• newsdetail.asp?
• module/mod_novasfh?

Even after clearing or 301 redirecting 404 errors, a few days later, they explode again and create hundreds of errors in Search Console/Webmaster Tools

Answer 1

Where are the links coming from? A Template?

"?p=1504" should not 404, if it's attached to the end of an existing "200" url.

Do a crawl with an app called "Screaming Frog" to determine where your 404s are actually coming from then you can fix in your templates.

Sounds like your just sweeping the actual problem under the carpet and not fixing the source of the problem!

Answer 2

Just doing a quick google tells me mod_novasfh is a Joomla module and newsdetail.asp is a piece of code from an Entrallweb product. Neither are likely related to your website and both are old pieces of code with security vulnerabilities.

Why google is crawling is crawling the links is the real question. It could be referral spam where hackers are putting up random links to your website. Usually these could come from a couple domains, so just tell google to disavow the links. You can also try blocking the referrers on the server level with some .htaccess or nginx trickery.

Another possibly: Is your website/server hacked? Monitor your own server's logs and see what's going on. If you recently moved on from something like WordPress or Joomla, make sure those products are not still hiding somewhere on your server where hackers are injecting the links.

If you have old installs of software and those websites still accessible on the internet, hackers tend to find them and exploit ancient versions. (Websites that link to you could also fall victim to this though that's less likely.) phpmyadmin is another common one that people tend to use and then forget about; the older version then gets exploited.