Strange 404 Crawl Errors in Webmaster Tools

Good evening!

One week ago I noticed that the 404 crawl errors shown in Webmaster tools have increased a lot. But they are very strange.

Let's say my website is named www.strangeissue.com with thee sub-pages www.strangeissue.com/post1, www.strangeissue.com/post2 and www.strangeissue.com/post3. In the header of each page I have a list of icons for each social page (ex: Facebook, Google+, ...) and, in particular, an icon for email contact (ex: [email protected]). In the source code , you will find the following:

<a href="[email protected]" class="email" target="_blank" style="opacity: 0.65;"><span>Email</span></a>

Now, in Webmasters tools, I have the following crawl errors:

post1/[email protected] 404
post2/[email protected] 404
post3/[email protected] 404

When I click on the link to see the source of the error for post1/[email protected], the "Linked from" tab shows the following:

http://www.strangeissue.com/post1
http://mysp.ac/ID (where ID is an alphanumerical code)

I do not know what mysp.ac is. I wrote site:mysp.ac in Google search field and I found a lot of URLs with IDs targeting different pages on different websites. My first feeling is that it refers to some domain related to myspace (I have an account where I put links towards my posts).


Could you please tell me what that site is about and how I can solve those errors where the email address is concatenated to the urls? Should I remove the email link from my header?

You may be the victim of a NSEO attack, people generate lots of 404's to mess your rankings up.

Thank you, mickyfu, but I am not sure that it is an attack since one of two sources of the problem is the page itself, i.e.

post1/[email protected] with the page source of issue being http://www.strangeissue.com/post1

But I do not understand why the bot tries to crawl that url.

For the second source of issue (mysp.ac), I am waiting for concrete explanation from those of you that have knowledge about it.

PrinceVisi, I am using Wordpress. But what would be the explanation for that issue? Why does Google try to crawl the page url concatenated to the email address? I would better try to understand the reason and solve the issue at the root instead of redirecting uselessly.

Any idea, guys?

use robot.txt to block all these urls

Your link is wrong, you need to write href = mailto: email adress and that in qoutes. At the moment you're giving the bot a real www-based link and he tries to crawl it, hence the 404.

BHW moderation system is blocking me from writing it any better

Here is the correct code: justpaste . it/ek7x