Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
4XX Errors - Adding %5c%5c to Links
-
Hi all
Hope someone can help me with this.
The internal links on my hubby's business site occasionally break and add %5c%5c%5c endlessly to the end of the url - like this:
site.com/about/hours-of-operation/\\\\\\\\%
I cannot for the life of me figure out why it is doing this and while it has happened to me from time to time, I can't recreate it.
My crawl diagnostics here in my SEOMox campaign show 19-20 urls doing this - it's nuts.
Any insight?
Thank you!!
Jennifer
~PotPieGirl
-
Both Shane and I looked and neither of saw any / vs \ issues.
Then, I just took a peek at my source code and look what I saw:
http://screencast.com/t/y02R4RS2L
Think that is it?
Thanks for replying!
Jennifer
-
Sent you a PM, Shane - thanks so much for the offer!
By "occasionally break", I mean that every now and again, any link on the site will freak out and add the %5c jibberish to the end.
Jennifer
-
It would really have to be....
The only reason for a %5C is the use of backslash - as that is actually what it means in code.
**business site occasionally break **
How do you mean "break" ?
My crawl diagnostics here in my SEOMox campaign show 19-20 urls doing this - it's nuts.
Is the only issue from this in SEOMOZ reports?
If you would like to PM me the site I can attempt to profile it
-
Thanks for replying so quickly, Shane!
I don't believe it's a / vs \ issue. It's a wordpress site. Key pages are in the top nav bar (all urls correct) and all the side bar links are 'widgets' and created by Wordpress.
For some reason I am suspecting a theme issue, but if I can't recreate the error, I'll have no way of knowing if changing the theme solves the problem.
Site has been online since 2010 with no issues...this is a new issue (past couple months according to crawl diagnostics).
Thanks!!!
-
somewhere in your url coding you added backslash instead of slash which is not valid.
-
It appears from research it is actually \ (backslash) not / (slash)
So possibly somewhere in your site you have used \ instead of / but of course this is just a possibility, as it appears that %5C is the delimiter or interpretation of \ in original Unix.
Hope this helps
PS a quick check at http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp verified %5c is URL encode, for backslash - as it is treated as a special character, so somewhere in your CMS or code, you have used backslash instead of slash.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Find all external 404 errors/links?
Hi All, We have recently discovered a site was linking to our site but it was linking to an incorrect url, resulting in a 404 error. We had only found this by pure chance and wondered if there was a tool out there that will tell us when a site is linking to an incorrect url on our site? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | O2C0 -
Duplicate content and 404 errors
I apologize in advance, but I am an SEO novice and my understanding of code is very limited. Moz has issued a lot (several hundred) of duplicate content and 404 error flags on the ecommerce site my company takes care of. For the duplicate content, some of the pages it says are duplicates don't even seem similar to me. additionally, a lot of them are static pages we embed images of size charts that we use as popups on item pages. it says these issues are high priority but how bad is this? Is this just an issue because if a page has similar content the engine spider won't know which one to index? also, what is the best way to handle these urls bringing back 404 errors? I should probably have a developer look at these issues but I wanted to ask the extremely knowledgeable Moz community before I do 🙂
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
?_escaped_fragment_= Duplicate error in Webmaster
Hi I am not sure where this came from ... ?escaped_fragment= But in webmaster we are seeing hundreds of pages with this and thus webmaster is saying that we have Pages with duplicate title tags How do I fix this, or remove it. Regards T
Technical SEO | | Taiger0 -
How to set up internal linking with subcategories?
I'm building a new website and am setting up internal link structure with subcategories and hoping to do so with best Seo practices in mind. When linking to a subcategory's main page, would I make the internal link www.xxx.com/fishing/ or www.xxx.com/fishing/index.html or does it matter? I'm just trying to avoid duplicate content I guess, if Google saw each page as a separate page. Any other cautions when using subdirectories in my navigation?
Technical SEO | | wplodge0 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
Links from the same server has value or not
Hi Guys, Sometime ago one of the SEO experts said to me if I get links from the same IP address, Google doesn't count them as with much value. For an example, I am a web devleoper and I host all my clients websites on one server and link them back to me. Im wondering whether those links have any value when it comes to seo or should I consider getting different hosting providers? Regards Uds
Technical SEO | | Uds0 -
Find broken links in Excel?
Hello, I have a large list of URL's in an excel sheet and I am looking for a way to check them for 404 errors. Please help! Adam
Technical SEO | | digitalops0 -
404 Errors After Site Migration
Hello - I'm working on a website selling fashion accessories. The site just went through a site migration from Yahoo! to Big Commerce. Now we have a high level of warnings and errors from the crawl. Few are mentioning sites I never seen before on the Yahoo! platform. I also notice that the pages crawled has doubled. How can I fix or did I do something wrong with migration? I was running the website with minimal errors and now overwhelmed with errors all the error updates. If I can get some assistance on what could be wrong, I would greatly appreciate. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ShopChameleon0