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 -
Spike in server errors
Hi, we've recently changed shopping cart platforms. In doing so a lot of our URL's changed, but I 301'ed all of the significant landing pages (as determined by G Analytics) prior to the switch. However, WMT is warning me about this spike in server errors now with all the pages that no longer exist. However they are only crawling them because they used to exist/are linked from pages that used to exist. and no longer actually exist. Is this something I should worry about? Or let it run its course?
Technical SEO | | absoauto0 -
Unnatural Links on Forum Posts
Google responds to my reconsideration request. They give me like 2 links of the many unnatural links which are actually people mentioning our website in their conversation. How can that be unnatural, legitimate people discussing about our website services? Even if it's unnatural, how can I possibly remove a backlink from a forum post?
Technical SEO | | Droidman860 -
What do I do with these back links?
In the last two weeks, I've got 10 pingbacks from this http://caraccidentlawyer.cc/coroner-ids-berkeley-bodies-who-were-killed-in-recent-car-accident/ and sites like it. The featured attorney is a competitor of ours and, since the links aren't sex/drugs/rock&roll related, (and he's linked too) I doubt this is a negative SEO campaign, but I want it to stop. These blogs are basically pure spam. Any suggestions?
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
Navigation links tagged as H3
I'm reviewing a website that has used the H3 tag in the Navigation Menu. I've not seen that before and first thought is it is a dodgy. Tags should relate to content on the page not link to another page. As a result of using H3 in Nav the ratio of content wrapped in Heading tags vs body content is quite high. My recommendation is to remove H3 tag from Nav but having searched Moz and not finding an article to verify that recommendation thought I'd ask the question.
Technical SEO | | NicDale0 -
How Does Link Juice Pass?
Say there is a link on an authoritative site to my site, and the link points to www.mysite.com. However, I have set all URL variations (https://mysite.com, www.mysite.com, mysite.com, etc.) to redirect to http://mysite.com automatically. Does the link juice from this authoritative site pass through the www.mysite.com URL to http://mysite.com automatically due to the automatic redirect? I guess my question is does the link juice automatically pass on to the destination URL, even though it is not the original URL the authoritative site pointed to?
Technical SEO | | NiallTom0 -
Bad back links
Hi Folks I seem to have approx 587 back links to my homepage from this site kitchendetailsanddesign.com since my entire site has under a 1000 back links; I wonder if I should be worried? I've tried contacting the webmaster to remove them but no luck any tips 🙂
Technical SEO | | PHDAustralia680 -
SEO LINKS
New to S.E.O. so excuse my naivety. I have made lots of new links some of them paid for e.g. Best of the Web but I don’t see any change in the latest competitive link analysis. Some of the links we have been accepted for just do not show. Also the keywords we are trying to promote the most have disappeared off the radar for over 2 weeks now. I think we have followed the optimization suggestions correctly. Please could you enlighten me. Regards Paul www.curtainpolesemporium.co.uk
Technical SEO | | CPE0