Numbers added at the end of URLs – 404s

Hi guys,

Seeing over 40,000 404s in Google Webmasters. These accumulated over a period of few months. Almost all URLs have numbers at the end.

E.g. domain.com/post-name/5445/4545

Here is the screenshot of 4 such URLs (these 4 are for same post)

https://i.imgur.com/idn54jr.png

You can see the number at the end of the URLs.

Checked RAW Log files from Cpanel and these 404 don’t have a referrer.

These URLs are only found by Search Engine Bots. Link checkers like Xenu don’t encounter these.

Here is little bit background:

In August we had a premium theme from Themeforest called Pinpress. That theme has messed up code. It created over 20,000 404s in Google Webmasters. They acknowledged that their theme did that. We gave up on them because they fixed some of the code but then more of their code had similar problems. They kept saying it’s an honest mistake.

We changed to Newspaper (Another Premium Theme from Themeforest) in September. So, I thought they should no longer appear. We ran some broken link checkers e.g. Link Checker, Website Auditor, Xenu and W3C Link Checkers. All of those numbered permalinks do not show up in the source code anymore. On the previous theme they did show up on all of these link checkers.

But I am not sure how Google finds them because source code does not have them (on the older theme we could see these numbered broken links). I have seen Google cached versions of pages and they also show the new theme (Newspaper).

Our sitemap also lists all the correct URLs without numbers.

Any ideas guys?