301 rediects - weird characters
-
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 -
So was it escaping the special characters that did the trick, Ted?
-
Got it working! Should have cleared my cache first!
Cheers
Ted
-
Hi Paul,
Got it working, should have cleared my cache first! Tried Fetch as Google and it works!
Thanks for your help!
Ted
-
Are you writing the redirects directly into an htaccess file, Teddi? Or into a plugin like WordPress's Redirection plugin?
-
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 -
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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!
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
-
Can I use £ character in title tag?
Hi - Can you use something like "save £££s" in the title tag. Have looked but can't see an answer. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | StevieD0 -
Complete redesign of website and 301 redirects
I did a complete redesign and content change for my website. I have my new webpages indexed but they still haven't replaced the old ones after 1 month. In search results I see both the old ones and the news ones. How long of a delay should I expect (approximately) for the old pages to be replaced by the new ones knowing the entire website was changed. Thank you,
On-Page Optimization | | seoanalytics0 -
Google cuts meta title after 60 characters and meta description after 130 characters. Is this new?
Hey community, We noticed, that our meta's are cutted after much lesser characters then it used to. Mainly after 130-135. Did i miss something? Should we basically consider to write meta's constantly with lesser then 130 characters instead of the advised 160 characters? Cheers, Boris
On-Page Optimization | | posthumus0 -
With 301 Redirects Does Changing URLs Matter?
We are redesigning our website in order to give it a more modern visual look. For the most part all the content will remain the same. Our old site is hosted on .asp so all of our current URLs look something like this: www.example.com/products/food.asp We plan on using 301 redirects in order to update every URL and remove the .asp. Since we are going to be doing 301 redirects for every existing URL anyways, does it matter from an SEO and ranking standpoint, if we also change the content and structure of the URL? For example, would we see a ranking impact if we were to change the above example URL to www.example.com/food? Obviously we want to try to retain as much link juice and ranking factors as possible during this redesign. Another issue we are seeing is with the image file names of our existing website images. We are moving to a new CMS platform (WordPress) that automatically saves images using a folder path similar to this: wp-uploads/2015-08/food. Will that change affect our SEO or ranking at all? When Google crawls an image does it care about the full path? Any insight would be much appreciated! 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | BlueLinkERP0 -
How long keep 301 redirects?
Our site has been updated twice in the past 6 years with new, better urls. Initially we did 301 redirects 3 years ago for the url redirects. Recently some of those redirected pages have been redirected again. Question: How long before it's time to have the old, original urls removed through Google? And, once that is done, how long to wait before removing the older redirects from the htaccess file? Appreciate any feedback/insights on this matter.
On-Page Optimization | | Manifestation0 -
301 Redirect from .html
Hi there, Following on from this post:
On-Page Optimization | | finelinewebsolutions
http://moz.com/community/q/help-with-duplicated-content Please could one confirm that using the following code in our htaccess file will stop the duplicated content issue we are having. RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^.]+.)+html?\ HTTP
RewriteRule (.+).html?$ http://www.bereavementstationery.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html Kind Regards Alec0 -
301 redirect usage
I just wondering if using a lot of 301 redirects could hurt to my seo? We have site which have a lot of content with such links: title: This Is Title page url: www.site.com/This-Is-Title-page.html and we use for each page 301 redirect to remove capital letters in url: www.site.com/this-is-title-page.html Is this is good idea and not hurting to seo ? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | bele0 -
Google found bad links delete them or 301 redirect?
we went into our google account and saw about 70 bad links that they found on our site. what's the best thing to do, seo-wise: should we go into the pages that have the bad links and delete them from the html code, or re-direct them in our htaccess script?
On-Page Optimization | | DerekM880