Are /1000 URLs in Google Search Console an Issue? – An Expert Opinion

Since early 2024, I’ve noticed a lot of clients have experienced a high number of /1000 URLs appearing in their Google search consoles, and the"issue" (it’s not an issue) still exists today with the /1000s still appearing on newer sites too.

After a quick Google search, it seems like a common issue across lots of websites, with hundreds of topics and forum questions about it.

At first this may seem alarming, especially as they come up under the"(404) Not Found" or"Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user" tabs in the Google search console pages – with a button to validate a fix, suggesting they’re an issue.

Is it an issue? Should I be worried?

No – These were initially thought to be spam links (and they probably are), which worried a lot of website owners, but a senior search analyst at Google was quickly on hand to respond to the issue in this Reddit thread clearly stating that they have no impact…

“You can just ignore these. There’s absolutely nothing you need to do about them. They have no negative (or positive!) effect on your site’s SEO.”

John Mueller, Senior Search Analyst at Google

John Mueller later goes on to suggest that he’s seen a number of topics with potential solutions for this, from disallowing them in robots.txt, redirecting them, disavowing them, and blocking them with 410s, etc… but he confidently states that all options"do nothing" and these /1000 links will simply be ignored – so have no effect on your SEO. They’re nothing to worry about.

“Google & the other search engines have a lot of practice dealing with random spammers & random link-spam. The web is full of weird & wonderful things, and full of so much useless spam. All search engines discard or de-prioritize a lot of junk in order to find the highlights that users want to find”

John Mueller, Senior Search Analyst at Google

How to remove them?

As stated above, doing nothing is probably the best solution for this, as they are already being ignored by Google, so any activity on your part as a website owner is essentially a waste of time.

However, if you do want to get rid of them from your Google search console tabs, the best way in my opinion would be to disallow them in your robots.txt file. This is the sort of thing my care plans handle each month.

Disallow: */1000