Very odd behavior. Google is changing “%20” to “+” in my URLS
-
I just realized many of the links on my site are BROKEN when entered from a Google SERP. This didn’t used to be this way. I have no idea what’s going but I’m worried.
It involves a folder of our site that has a space in it. Google is even displaying the proper “%20” in the SERP but when I click the link it replaces that “%20” with a + which breaks the link!!
You can see this in action by typing in “brown jordan sheffield furniture” without quotes into Google. You’ll see our site come up first and displaying this link sheffieldfurniture.com/Other%20Furniture/BrownJordan.html but when you click it the link is broken!
This is happening on many of our pages! Anyone know what in the world is going on?
-
Hmm interesting, now that you mention it. This issue isn't happening for me in Safari, IE or Firefox but it is happening in Chrome.
I have not, I don't do much with .htacccess and when I've tried it hasn't worked hah. Not sure how I would go about doing that.
-
I don't think it's Google that is causing the problem, perhaps it's the browser.
In Chrome, I searched for your keyword. I noticed the '%20' (the HTML character for a space) in the URL of the first result. When I moused over the result, the HREF that showed had a space in the URL in place of the '%20'. When I clicked on the result, it correctly sent me to your page, and did not replace '%20' with a '+' symbol - which can also be used to replace a space.
Have you tried writing .htaccess redirects to send users to the correct page if they encounter a situation where they are attempting to hit the + URL when they should hit the '%20' URL?
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
-
Why Google not showing all search result even Google index more than 14k.. its showing 120 only
http://www.blackbowchauffeur.com.au/ any advice why Google not showing full search result.... Even its more than 14k indexed and show only 122 in search result... Same as Bing ... and Yahoo...
Industry News | | blackbowchauffeur0 -
What Google Analytics Data to Share with Potential Website Buyer
Hi Mozzers,
Industry News | | emerald
We have contacted our competitors to let them know we would like to sell our website (domain and all content). One of them has asked for Google Analytics data. Which parts of this and how is this data best shared in such a case? As this is the opening of offers, I'm assuming some kind of PDF export with a summary of some Analytics data is sufficient to see who is serious. Then for those who are serious more data could be shared. Or is it ever ok to share your full Analytics with a competitor? Would love to hear what data and best practises are used to share this kind of information. Thank you.0 -
Google Custom Search vendors and options
Hi everyone, We're in the process of finding someone who will be able to help set up Google Custom Search on our site and are having some trouble - most agencies we were hoping could help solely focus on Google Search Appliance, a hardware-specific approach that doesn't suit our needs. Specifically, we'd like to replace our current site search engine with Google Custom search, as well as configure it as deeply as possible for the best search experience I'm hoping people could give me some ideas on who might be able to help, or the best places to look. Thanks in advance!
Industry News | | digitalcrc1 -
What are the click-through rates by position for organic search on Google by industry?
I'm interested in knowing what the average CTRs are by industry (specifically for the credit card industry). Here's an example of what I want in aggregate (not by industry): http://searchengineland.com/organic-click-thru-rates-tumbling-study-97338 Is this information available?
Industry News | | wepayinc0 -
Google Cached "Text Only" version
Is there a way to test what a page would look like in Google "Text Only" version before a page is indexed in Google? Is there a tool out there to help with this?
Industry News | | activejunky10 -
Searching for a keyword on html source code of a website via Google
Is such a thing possible? Can we google for a specific keyword that can be found on the source code of a website? Is there any search operator for this? Thanks in advance!
Industry News | | merkal20050 -
How changing my domain name brought back rankings.
First I would not recommend doing this to anyone else, but my circumstances were extreme.
Industry News | | AlanMosley
Let me explain to those that did not read previous posts on the subject. I had a domain thatsit.net.au, I had never really promoted it as I used a keyword domain to rank in search engines but kept this domain mainly for email, but having said that it did rank ok considering, it ranked first for my business name at least.
A few moths back I decided to promote it and check the rankings, I was surprised to see that it ranked last for almost every thing,. Even my business name. Let me impress when I say last I mean in most cases absolute last and if not last very, very close to last.
I decided to get some links happening to move it of bottom, in my experiences a site that ranks that bad even a few links with show a big jump in rankings, it is easier to get from page 1000 to page 900 than it is to get from page 2 to page 1. The site had about 200 links and I pushed that up to about 1,000 but I was still at the bottom even for long tails searches where I was the only exact match on the internet.
asking for advice I got responses like you need better links and the such, this did not account for the sudden drop in rankings, as I knew the history I knew that thee was something deeper going on, I asked Google for reconsideration they said there was no manual action taken.
I should also mention I ranked very well in Bing all this time and still do.
By now I was getting paranoid that someone was stuffing me up somehow as a last resort I changed the domain name from thatsit.net.au to thatsit.com.au I did this about 10 days ago.
Today I searched for my company name and I came up #4 not bad from not being in the top 1,000 a few days ago.
Rankings are not where they used to be but I can handle that, I have 301’ed across all my links and have stated to change over the links I control, but as I still don’t know why the other domain would not move from the bottom as search results I am nervous that I may 301 over the problem.
I have never really done anything in the way of Black Hat SEO that would get me banned, maybe a bit of light grey over the years but nothing to worry about.
Anyhow I am non the wiser as to why things happened like they did. But I did want to report back to others that read the posts and thought that maybe I was imaging things.
I was never really depended on the domain ranking, what really bothers me is not knowing why the .net.au domain fell from rankiings and I still don’t know why.1