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Employee Advisor

It is very possible that redirects could be at play. The redirects could either be from the 404 page itself, or a redirect taking them to a bad URL.

To troubleshoot this, you could create a segment where "visits contain page not found", then take a look at just a regular pages report. While those pages aren't 404's, they might provide an indicator to contributors to 404 pages.

I'd also explore properly passing the referrer through redirects. See Redirects and Aliases for details.