301 rediects - weird characters

[Jon-C]

Hi,

Just cleaning up some 404 errors in my site in GWT and noticed a couple of external links pointing at me that are wrong.

Basically they are from a couple of DIY forum sites (I've not put these links in place myself they are 100% natural) and it appears that the owners of the forums amend the links (inserting characters into link) so they are not quite right.

How would I go about redirecting the following -

www.example.co.uk/blueberry_pie.htm

Whatever I try doesn't work and I always end up with a 404!

Cheers
J

[ThompsonPaul]

So was it escaping the special characters that did the trick, Ted?

[Jon-C]

Got it working! Should have cleared my cache first!

Cheers

Ted

[Jon-C]

Hi Paul,

Got it working, should have cleared my cache first! Tried Fetch as Google and it works!

Thanks for your help!

Ted

[ThompsonPaul]

Are you writing the redirects directly into an htaccess file, Teddi? Or into a plugin like WordPress's Redirection plugin?

[Jon-C]

Hi Paul

Just tried and it didn't work, when looking in the html code the link appears as the following

http://www.example.co.uk/blue<u>berry_pie.htm

Would I stick the '' in before each of the % signs?

Cheers
T

[TakeshiYoung]

Where are you putting the redirect? The following code should work in your .htaccess file, regardless of the special character:

redirect 301 /blueberry_pie.htm http://www.example.com/new-url.htm

[Jon-C]

Thanks text marketing, the question is how as because of the strange within the link it does not seem to work when I set up the 301 redirect.

[ThompsonPaul]

You're going to need to escape the unusual characters in the URL in order to redirect them, Teddi.

When writing redirects, characters like < and > have special meaning as Regular Expression characters, so your server is trying to process those characters as their special regex functions, instead of just being plain old characters.

The way to turn them back into regular old characters is to place a "****" in front of the special characters.

So... the URL you are trying to redirect should be written as

www.example.co.uk/blue<u>berry_pie.htm</u>

Try that & let me know if it solves your problem.

Paul

[TextMarketing]

If you want to get the "SEO juice" from those pages that link to you, you can simple set up a 301 redirect to the page it's supposed to be pointed to. That should work just fine!

Hope that helps!