Why am I seeing broken links for pages that never existed on my site?

Question: On the app's Broken Links page, I'm seeing URLs for pages that never existed on my site. Where are these coming from?

Answer: Most likely there is another site that is linking to nonexistent pages on your site. Possibly they meant to link to another site with a similar name as yours where those pages do exist, but they made a typo and linked to your site instead.

In any case, the thing to keep in mind is that when a URL appears in  Broken Links, it does not necessarily come from a broken link on your site. It just means that someone tried to visit that URL on your site, but there is no page for that URL, so our app created a redirect for that nonexistent page.

It is unfortunately impossible to trace the origin of a broken link since there's no way to know where each visitor to your site is coming from. However, no harm is done to your SEO as long as the nonexistent page has a redirect to an existing page on your site—and our app takes care of that automatically. 👍