ObservationsIndexation and crawling

Search Console showed web addresses that never existed, at position 1

Photo of Nizam Ud Deen UsmanNizam Ud Deen Usman27 October 2026
2 minutes read
In short

On two different sites, addresses that were never published appeared in Search Console with one impression each, ranking first.

What I did

I looked at the smallest rows in Search Console's Pages report on two sites. On one, 16 addresses at position 1 had a few impressions each. On the other, 7 did. Many were addresses that never existed: a misspelled folder, a path ending in a colon, and slugs the site never used, such as a pizza calculator page. I opened them to see what happens.
Where

A restaurant website and a cleaning services website, October 2026
What changed

On the restaurant site, a few redirect to the right page, but 10 return a 404 error. On the cleaning site, every variant of one popular article redirects to the homepage instead of to that article.
What you should do

In Search Console, sort your Pages report by impressions, lowest first, and open the odd-looking addresses. Each one should land on the real page it resembles, not on an error or the homepage.
How long it took

About an hour to check

A 404 error is the response a server gives when an address does not exist.

Why it matters

Each of these addresses was shown in a search result, so someone may have clicked it. If it leads to an error page or the homepage, that visit is lost.

I do not know for certain where these addresses come from. One possibility is AI answers that create a link which looks right but is not real. The variants are close to real pages, which fits that idea, but it is not proven.

Redirecting them all to the homepage is not a good fix. Google tends to treat that as a missing page anyway, and the visitor still has to search again.

How to check your own site

  • Open the five oddest addresses in your Pages report.
  • For each, check where it ends up. Redirect it to the closest real page.

At a glance

Effort to copyAbout an hour
Type of businessCleaning services, Restaurant and food
SubjectIndexation and crawling
16odd addresses on one site
7on the other
10lead to a 404 on one site
What this changed in how I work

I now look at the bottom of the Pages report as well as the top. Strange addresses there show where people are being sent, even if the site never created those pages.

Part of The SEO Lab, an open notebook of real SEO work, published as it happens.Recorded 27 October 2026. Filed under Observations. Everything here comes from work I did myself. If a number looks wrong, ask me how it was measured.

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