Weird URLs Showing Up in GA4?

[ceeze]

Hi,

GA4 is showing that my client's site has pages with "Page Not Found" as the number 1 title for page views. Currently shows around 1200 views in the past month were to pages with this title (title indicating a 404, but from different URLs). When I looked into it via an Exploration report, I found that an overwhelming majority of the URLs causing this don't even exist on our site. They're malformed URLs using one of our old locations as a parent and then completely unrelated slugs.

These are URLs that are not found on our site and don't show up in any crawl or in GSC. I don't know where people would even click on these as they don't even make sense. My boss thinks they might be created by bots.

Not sure what's going on here. Note - I'm not a GA4 expert by any means. Does anyone have any ideas?


P.S. - I wasn't sure if this was the right place to post this question but chose marketing since it deals with GA4.

 

[keyserholiday]

Did the URLs originally exist, or are they made up?

 

[JoyHawkins]

Have you checked to see if there are backlinks pointing to any of the URLs (I'd start with the ones that got the most traffic)?

 

[JS Girard]

I'm reminded of this article from last year: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-console-404-error-report-1000-urls-36728.html