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Bogus links to my site from other random sites - anybody else seeing this or know what it is?

So I got in Google webmaster tools and it is reporting crawl errors to pages on my site.

The problem is the pages in question don't exist, never did and never will. They are links from various other sites. At least one of which is a free website.

Why would someone make these links? Surely it is too much work just to hope I would click to see what these broken links are?

For instance:
Google says I have a broken link www.mysite/astrology/data from a site I never heard of. If I go to the site it is a list of links including that one.

I would write it off as a fluke but there are a half-dozen sites with astrology links and then a site with witchcraft links etc.

The site I work on is for a software company selling add-ons for MS products. Nothing to do with those links.

Any ideas what I'm dealing with?

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Dave Baldwin

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EndeavorToPersevere

ASKER

It turns out the person who owns .de version of our site is a private person rather than a company and is into astrology.

So when people are putting lists of links together they are substituting .com for .de and I end up with the bogus links pointing at my site. :-(

At least the mystery is solved. For now it is probably not worth the hassle to get the people to fix their links.

Dave Baldwin

Good, at least you found out. I don't think Google penalizes you for those things. Thanks for the points.