bailiwick

Hey,
I think it is fixed now. I hope my understanding of Google explanation is correct. In my research I found that Google bot makes such 404s quite often and that it is OK. Go figure. From what I understood best solution is mark all those ridiculous non-existing pages as fixed and bot will sort them out by itself.
I did that, also I removed all redirects I made before (which truly never made sense to me), and it seems to work.
Solution is quite easy than, but still unnecessary work for nothing.
Guys thank you for all your help. I hope my fix is correct and that it will help those of you who need it.

Thank you King,
I did this scan before, but still, thank you for reminding me. Glad my site came through verified clean.
I won’t mark this topic as resolved yet.
I’m still facing that “mysterious” cause for google & bing bots finding spam links buried somewhere inside linking to nonexistent pages on my site.
It might be one of my plugins. I’ll try to uninstall one, but I’ll be able to see any changes only after week or two. They are generated irregularly, but in last 4 months I had close to 100 404s.
If I’ll find the solution I’ll update this thread.
I’m still eager to find help here if possible.

Hi guys!
The site: matoteam.sk

Those spam links are linked from inside. (all redirected now)
Removing pages through Google Remove tool – haven’t thought about this. But I would have to do that on Bing also, bingbot finds some of them too. 301 was less work and faster in this sense. But it seems I’ll have to do it anyway, because those spam links did generated some traffic. And I don’t want this site to be associated with spam sites in any way.
I still would prefer to find the source, and stop spam links from being created again and again.
Thanks for your advices.

Hello!
I still did not/cannot resolved this issue. Frankly, second part of my post is what I’m concerned about the most at this time.
The thing is, I have 21 text widgets in my header area, which I control with widget controller to show each one on particular posts. With individual posts it works fine. Only text widgets marked for particular post are shown.
But when it comes to category pages (links are in my 1st post above), those widgets are not suppose to be there, but my header displays all 21 text widgets. They are stripped of the content but still showing empty divs.
And as you see, each div has bottom border assigned to it with CSS.
So 21 empty widgets push main content down.
I will appreciate your help, tip or advice.
Thanks in advance.

@alicemdesign
You are correct. My Ftp settings were set to show hidden files, but for some reason I had to refresh the program for it to work.
So yes, you were correct.
Thanks.

Hi, Thank you for suggestion.
I have the visibility of those files set on, and I still see none.
Meanwhile I need to report this: I couldn’t wait, so I went ahead and created new htaccess and pasted all BWPS code in it. I should not do that. My whole site crashed. I could open homepage only. None of subpages or articles.
So I uninstall whole plugin, reinstall it and applied settings with one click options only. This gave me basic security only, but it doesn’t cause any problems.
So my site works now, but I still don’t know where my htaccess went.