I guess it must be referrer spam too. I just don't see how you could monetize it very well.
Nothing I know of SEO even hints at a way that it could hurt rankings. Maybe if they use spammy words then it could. Or tried to cannibalize a high ranking page. Though I cant find many examples of it on the web.
Did you notice any effect on your website rankings?
Referrer spam is, put plainly, a bot either targeting your website directly with a fake referrer or a bot that targets your Google Analytics data directly (ghost referrer spam). The latter of which never actually hits the site.
This 404 error spam targets the default search parameters of WordPress by repeatedly searching for URLs (or so I assume). If I recall correctly, some of the perpetrator sites were infected with malware, so whoever was behind the spam could have been hoping the webmasters became curious enough about the soft 404 errors to visit the sites the spammer was searching for. There may have been no motive to monetise it; consider the ridiculousness of the URL spam that hits this forum each day.
As for how it could hurt rankings, some people have suggested that too many 404 errors "
waste crawl budget". Something similar is mentioned on the Google support page as well.
Returning a code other than 404 or 410 for a non-existent page (or redirecting users to another page, such as the homepage, instead of returning a 404) can be problematic. Firstly, it tells search engines that there’s a real page at that URL. As a result, that URL may be crawled and its content indexed. Because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently and your site’s crawl coverage may be impacted (also, you probably don’t want your site to rank well for the search query [File not found]).
I read that Google supposedly released
an algorithm update that prohibits or reduces a site's internal search results from being indexed, but the author of the article didn't link to any source and only implied that they heard it from Gary Illyes at some SEM conference.
My site's rankings didn't change, but I was also quick to resolve the issue, so I wouldn't know how it affects rankings.
As a side note, in the post you deleted in this thread, you mentioned that the username tag didn't work. That's because you put the @ symbol outside of the bold tag. If you're going to embolden your text, you need to include the @ symbol inside the B tag, like this:
@Zwielicht
Code:
Your post below vvvv
@[B]Zwielicht do you have any thoughts about this?[/B]
