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
-
Quest about 404 Errors
About two months ago, we deleted some unnecessary pages on our website that were no longer relevant. However, MOZ is still saying that these deleted pages are returning 404 errors when a crawl test is done. The page is no longer there, at least that I can see. What is the best solution for this? I have a page that similar to the older page, so is it a good choice to just redirect the bad page to my good page? If so, what's the best way to do this. I found some useful information searching but none of it truly pertained to me. I went around my site to make sure there were no old links that directed traffic to the non existent page, and there are none.
Technical SEO | | Meier0 -
How to solve this merchant error?
Hello All, In my google merchant suddenly lots of warning appeared i.e. 1) Automatic item updates: Missing schema.org microdata price information 2) Missing microdata for condition Can you please tell me how to solve this errors? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | varo
John0 -
Internal link structure, find out if there are any internal links to this page
When i use this url in open site explorer it says that there are no internal links:
Technical SEO | | wilcoXXL
http://goo.gl/d2s6tJ
Page Authority is also 1, it should be higher of there are any internal links to it right? But i am very sure there are links to this url on my website. For example on this URL:
http://goo.gl/ucixRH How certain can i be of this? Because if i can be very certain, than we have a internal linkstructure problem on our entire site i believe.0 -
Internal Link Analysis Tool
I want to get a better handle on what internal link text (and co-occurance if possible) my site currently has. We have a lot of old blog articles that provide link juice back to the main site, but with thousands of pages, we never kept track of when we internally link to a page. Are there any tools that will provide an analysis of this? OpenSiteExplorer seems like a very tedious way to do it and it didn't appear to be 100% accurate. Also, are there any tools that will provide analysis and recommendations based on keywords targeted?
Technical SEO | | TheDude0 -
Fix or Block Webmaster Tools URL Errors Not Found Linked from a certain domain?
RE: Webmaster Tool "Not Found" URL Errors are strange links from webstatsdomain.com Should I continue to fix 404 errors for strange links from a website called webstatsdomain.com or is there a way to ask Google Webmaster Tools to ignore them? Most of Webmaster Tools "URL Not Found errors" I find for our website are from this domain. They refer to pages that never existed. For example, one was to www.mydomain.com/virtual. Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | zharriet0 -
Ratio of linking C-blocks to Linking domains
Hi, Our linkbuilding efforts have resulted in acquiring a high number of backlinks from domains within a C-block. We all know Google issues penalties whenever someone's link profile looks unnatural. A high number of backlinks but a low number of linking C-blocks would seem to be one of reasons to get penalized. Example: we have 6,000 links from 200 linking root domains coming in from 100 C-blocks. At what point should we start to worry about being penalized/giving off an unnatural look to mr G?
Technical SEO | | waidohuy0 -
Affiliate links
I have a wordpress blog and was wondering the best seo practice for doing affiliate link redirects? Peter
Technical SEO | | PeterM220 -
HTTP301 or link ?
We have a page on a website (let's name it ABC) which ranks very well on Google for a specific keyword but this keyword is not the main activity of website ABC. For this reason we created website XYZ for offering the services related to the specific keyword. How shall we redirect the visitors from website ABC to website XYZ so XYZ gets all the weight ? Is it best to do an HTTP301 from the specific page on site ABC or from site ABC, remove nearly all content related to the keyword and create a link to website XYZ ? Your advice is well appreciated.
Technical SEO | | netbuilder0