Your dummy page idea with an explanation may be the best and most authentic way of dealing with this situation rather than just returning a 404? It may also hav

Your dummy page idea with an explanation may be the best and most authentic way of dealing with this situation rather than just returning a 404? It may also have some minor positive affect on your rankings too. I'm sure google say having lots of 404's doesn't harm your rankings but it is a waste of googlebot resources that can be better served crawling your site rather than a bunch of dead ends. There are plenty of resources showing you backlinks to a given domain name. Some are paid and some free. A couple of decent free ones: https://neilpatel.com/backlinks/ https://neilpatel.com/backlinks/ https://domainstats.com/ https://domainstats.com/