What are partial urls and why this is causing a sitemap error?
-
Hi mozzers,
I have a client that recorded 7 errors when generating Xml sitemap. One of the errors appear to be coming from partial urls and apparently I would need to exclude them from sitemap. What are they exactly and why would they cause an error in the sitemap.
Thanks!
-
Thanks Jeff!
-
Taysir-
Partial URLs are often formed when you have illegal characters in the URL (such as an & symbol or a space) or you have name-value pairs (?id=1&location=54).
In some cases, the URLs that are generated in a site map may not be URL encoded properly, and then you get an error when submitting the site map.
The reasons this can happen:
-
You have a static page on your site with a space in the file name (i.e. /about us.html) You could fix this with a %20 where the space is (i.e. /about%20us.html)
-
You have a content management system (i.e. WordPress) and the URL is based on the page name. Usually this can be fixed by changing the URL key and removing special characters and spaces.
Here's a Google forum discussion on the topic:
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/oa0dbGvdP7c -
It's possible that you are using a relative URL in your CSS file, and that's throwing an error. More details here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/940451/using-relative-url-in-css-file-what-location-is-it-relative-to
Hope this helps!
-- Jeff -
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
-
How would you address these URLS
Hey Mozzers, long time no post. Just a quick one for you regarding URLS, this is an example of a url on a site https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/products/spacehoppers/special-spacehopper.html Many of these pages are getting flagged for having a url that is too long. The target of this page is "special spacehoppers". Should i be concerned with the url being to long given my keyword is at the end? Would this be a suitable idea? https://www.thisismyurl.co.uk/p/spacehoppers/special.html Would changing products to p be worthwhile? It would remove length from nearly all urls but would require a site wide re-direct. 2)Would removing the "spacehoppers" bit from the url be worth it? Yes it would shorten the url but would also remove the exact keyword from the url which could be detrimental to rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATP0 -
I'm noticing that URL that were once indexed by Google are suddenly getting dropped without any error messages in Webmasters Tools, has anyone seen issues like this before?
I'm noticing that URLs that were once indexed by Google are suddenly getting dropped without any error messages in Webmasters Tools, has anyone seen issues like this before? Here's an example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nystromandy
http://www.thefader.com/2017/01/11/the-carter-documentary-lil-wayne-black-lives-matter0 -
Attack of the dummy urls -- what to do?
It occurs to me that a malicious program could set up thousands of links to dummy pages on a website: www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy123 www.mysite.com/dynamicpage/dummy456 etc.. How is this normally handled? Does a developer have to look at all the parameters to see if they are valid and if not, automatically create a 301 redirect or 404 not found? This requires a table lookup of acceptable url parameters for all new visitors. I was thinking that bad url names would be rare so it would be ok to just stop the program with a message, until I realized someone could intentionally set up links to non existent pages on a site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood1 -
SEO benefit of tracked URLs
I've found a lot of mixed info on this topic so I thought I'd ask the experts (Moz community). If I'm adding tracking parameters to URLs to monitor organic traffic will this affect the rank/value of the original clean URL? If so, would best practice be to 301 redirect the tracked URL to the original:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
i.e. redirect www.example.com/category/?DZID=Organic_G_NP/SQ&utm_source=Organic&utm_medium=Google TO www.example.com/category Thanks for your help!
-Reed0 -
Images Sitemap GWT - not indexed?
So we went ahead and created an image sitemap of 2387 images, one for each product - I was hoping it would give us better exposure in image results. No joy, over 7 days and they only showing as "sent" but not "indexed". Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Does having shorter URLs help with rankings?
Hello here.I own an e-commerce website (virtualsheetmusic.com), and some of our most important category pages have pretty long URLs. Here is an example: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Violin.html I am evaluating the possibility to shorten URLs like the above to something like: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/violin/ But since it is going to pretty hard and time consuming (considering the custom system we have in place on that site), I am trying to find out if it really matters and worth doing it from a SEO stand point. I am aware that from a user prospective shorter URLs are preferable, and we plan to pursue a better URL architecture on our website in the near future just for that, but this question, at the moment, should be strictly related to SEO. Any thoughts on this topic are very welcome!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Optimisation change caused a drop
We are a web design company and SEO has never been our main thing but we can do it for clients quite well. We were ranking under web design and our location quite well up until 3 months ago. We didn't really have much on our page for web design but targetted website design instead. Our SEO guy who has proved himself for getting some of our clients to the top of Google under very generic search terms recommended we focus on Web Design, so I changed the site accordingly. 2 days later Google has seen our changes and now we've changed our H1 and copy. However, our ranking has dropped 1 place yet again. Obviously I've now panicked and am stressing (even feeling sick) about what to do. He is away until next week so I can't ask him. Could it be that Google has seen we're targetting the word and pushed us down? Shall I wait for the link building he's doing? My own link building lately seems to knock us down a place with every new link I'm doing (and I'm only adding the odd link - not spamming at all). What's odd is that we're still doing extremely well for keywords that aren't even mentioned in our copy at all really. If you could help or offer advice I'd be very grateful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sanchez19600 -
Changing my url name? Should I do it?
Hi, I am targeting a brand called Creative Recreation, who are a trainers brand. We currently rank ok-ish for certain terms for Creative Recreation Trainers, Footwear and Creative Recreation [INSERT STYLE NAME HERE]. Our main search term I think we would like to improve on is "creative recreation trainers" as we are 6th for this. Our domain name points to the brands page as designerboutique-online.com/all-clothing/creative-recreation/ Now what I want to know is, would it be worthwhile or would it affect my current rank/index if I changed the end of that url to read /creative-recreation-trainers/ thus getting the keyword phrase in the url? Creative-Recreation is a hard one to crack as you have a lot of competition from the brands site etc.. Any ideas on this? Cheers Will
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0