(Entry was posted by Valentina Huff on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 01/28/2016).

Ghostlike 404 errors

In our Search Console we constantly see 404 errors for pages that don`t exist and I have no idea where these pages keep coming from. Every couple months I see new pages generated in the crawl errors report that I`ve never seen before and I am not sure where these pages are being generated to be then recognized as 404 by Google. Anyone else have this problem?

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Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Valentina Huff: In our Search Console we constantly see 404 errors for pages that don't exist and I have no idea where these pages keep coming from. Every couple months I see new pages generated in the crawl errors report that I've never seen before and I am not sure where these pages are being generated to be then recognized as 404 by Google. Anyone else have this problem?
Neeraj Pandey: Kool +Valentina Huff once check the external links too or canonical tags . if you are sure you not giving these links just ignore them
Federico Sasso: By clicking on the path of the resources you should be able to see where they are linked from, did you already check that?
Ryan Cramer: If the links are coming from reputable or valuable sources, or the url structure might have value, you may want to consider either creating a page for that url, or if you are lazy, just 301ing them to a relative page.

If this is on an old(used) domain, the links may have been valid at some point - take advantage of them if you can.

Additionally, it is a good practice to create a 404 page that customizes bad links-possibly with an auto-search with a cleaned version of the bad link
Dave Elliott: i'd check for any common patterns in these "random pages" e.g. do they have parameters on them? Are they being generated by your internal site search or anything like that. If they are it might be worth going into webmastertools and VERY carefullly playing around with the crawl > parameter settings and your robots.txt file.
Jim Munro: From the expert panel in this week's SEO Questions hangout on air on 00:04:01 into the YouTube video: https://dumbseoquestions.com/q/ghostlike_404_errors +Valentina Huff

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Dave Elliott: Micah is bang on with his answer, a good point i wish i'd made! I'd also add that quite a lot of the time they come from a css files to add to his list...