Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Htaccess Redirect with %C2%A0 in URL

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Htaccess Redirect with %C2%A0 in URL

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    7
    11383
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • pepsimoz
      pepsimoz last edited by

      Below is my setup for redirects in .htaccess file in my root word press installation.

      • The www to non-www works well, so no problems there
      • Other page redirects work well, too (example: redirect 301 /some-page/ http://mysite.com/another-page/ (I didn't post those because I have a few too many : )

      So here it goes...

      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com$ [NC]
      RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

      BEGIN WordPress

      <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
      RewriteBase /
      RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
      RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule>

      END WordPress

      redirect 301 /archives/10-college- majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/

      redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%20majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/

      redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/

      I'm having a problem with the last 301 redirect:

      • redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/

      not working... As you can see I've tried using other varations of the "space" but no go. I also used a redirect in cPanel's Redirect screen; testing all the possible options + wildcard

      I've also tried this:

      • http://serverfault.com/questions/201829/using-special-characters-in-apache-mod-rewrite-rule (perhaps unsuccessfully, because it caused a 500 server error and it's a different situation in my case)

      I also saw something here:

      • http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3908682.htm

      but I don't know if it works and how I would implement that + do so without compromising ALL other redirects.

      Note: the URL displays with a space in the address bar of all major web browsers: http://mysite.com/10-college- majors/  and goes to a 404 page

      I have a goregous page / PR6 / high authority site linking to the URL on my site, but they copied the URL with a space somehow. I contacted the person responsible for the website and he claims it works fine (aka he didn't check it).

      Is there a clean way to redirect ONLY this problematic URL without compromising other redirects, etc?

      Any ideas would be great. I'll respond with progress. Thanks in advance.

      UPDATE
      the   redirect works, and it did work. Even so, when looking at source of page linking to mine, the URL looks like this: ```
      http://mysite.com/archives/10-college- majors/
      
      Clicking the URL in Source View in FireFox takes me to ```
      http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/
      
      none of my 301 redirects should direct there. I don't have any redirect plugins either.
      
      
      
      
      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • KeriMorgret
        KeriMorgret @pepsimoz last edited by

        I had problems getting redirects for URLs with spaces in them working correctly on my own site, and ended up using the Redirection plugin as well, and it's worked like a charm.

        The other thing I like about this plugin is the ability to see 404 errors and to set up redirects straight from that 404 list. If someone has linked to you and accidentally did a typo in the URL somewhere, or a comma got included in the hyperlink, you can see it in the 404 list and fix it right there.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • pepsimoz
          pepsimoz @DanDeceuster last edited by

          I ended up doing what you recommended. I downloaded the Redirection plugin.

          I copied the URL with %C2%A0 in it and setup a target URL without the space and the results were great. I double checked all my other redirects, in case of conflict - no worries there. Also I used the server header checker tool and saw a great 301 returning a 200 OK. That felt good.

          I still wanted to learn how to do it vs. how to "plug it" - see my thread here for all other woes related to this URL

          In the meanwhile I found out that it wasn't several great sites that were linking wrongly, it's like close to ten (some .edu, .org, and even one .mil - editorial links).

          Sometimes it's better to conform than to be a "purist". I saved tons of time by doing what I contemplated doing initially. Thanks for the push and for the help, Dan.

          KeriMorgret 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • pepsimoz
            pepsimoz @DanDeceuster last edited by

            That is an idea I have contemplated, but I'm trying to limit the number of plugins. I have other redirects working very well, but this one with the "space" is so pesky. I would love to solve the issue using .htaccess if possible. I am looking into other solutions and will post here when anything comes up. In the meanwhile, I hope others may help, too.

            Dan, thank you for your great feedback.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • DanDeceuster
              DanDeceuster last edited by

              Instead of using the htaccess file, you should download a wordpress plugin called SImple 301 Redirects. It's very easy. Maybe if you do the 301 reidrects at the wordpress plugin level then wordpress can handle them better.

              pepsimoz 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • pepsimoz
                pepsimoz @DanDeceuster last edited by

                Dan,
                
                Thanks for your response. I tried your recommendations. None worked.
                
                http://mysite.com/archives/10-college- majors/ is what I found in the source code, but my AWSTATS and Google Webmaster Tools point to a URL %C2%A0 as the culprit 404 error. I double checked if the URL registering in my Stats and Google WT is from that PR6 page - yes it is.
                
                There's no space in the URL from source code and I did a 301 redirect with this variation (see original post)
                
                The url only shows the space in the browser's address bar, but not in source.
                
                UPDATE
                the   redirect works, and it did work. Even so, when looking at source of page linking to mine, the URL looks like this: ```
                http://mysite.com/archives/10-college- majors/
                
                Clicking the URL in Source View in FireFox takes me to ```
                http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/
                
                none of my 301 redirects should direct there. I don't have any redirect plugins either.
                
                
                
                
                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • DanDeceuster
                  DanDeceuster last edited by

                  Can't you look up the source code of the page with the link to you? In there you should find your link at

                  pepsimoz 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • kirin44355

                    Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?

                    Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
                    https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
                    https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
                    https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
                    https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
                    https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
                    https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this? 
                    Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend. 
                    Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
                    Chris Gorski

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
                    0
                  • alex_goldman

                    All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself

                    Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
                    https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
                    0
                  • andyheath

                    Will disallowing URL's in the robots.txt file stop those URL's being indexed by Google

                    I found a lot of duplicate title tags showing in Google Webmaster Tools. When I visited the URL's that these duplicates belonged to, I found that they were just images from a gallery that we didn't particularly want Google to index. There is no benefit to the end user in these image pages being indexed in Google. Our developer has told us that these urls are created by a module and are not "real" pages in the CMS. They would like to add the following to our robots.txt file Disallow: /catalog/product/gallery/ QUESTION: If the these pages are already indexed by Google, will this adjustment to the robots.txt file help to remove the pages from the index? We don't want these pages to be found.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath
                    0
                  • ennovators

                    Replace dynamic paramenter URLs with static Landing Page URL - faceted navigation

                    Hi there, got a quick question regarding faceted navigation. If a specific filter (facet) seems to be quite popular for visitors. Does it make sense to replace a dynamic URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants.html?a_type=239 by a static, more SEO friendly URL e.x http://www.domain.com/pants/levis-pants.html by creating a proper landing page for it. I know, that it is nearly impossible to replace all variations of this parameter URLs by static ones but does it generally make sense to do this for the most popular facets choose by visitors. Or does this cause any issues? Any help is much appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ennovators
                    0
                  • tomcraig86

                    Canonical URL & sitemap URL mismatch

                    Hi We're running a Magento store which doesn't have too much stock rotation. We've implemented a plugin that will allow us to give products custom canonical URLs (basically including the category slug, which is not possible through vanilla Magento). The sitemap feature doesn't pick up on these URLs, so we're submitting URLs to Google that are available and will serve content, but actually point to a longer URL via a canonical meta tag. The content is available at each URL and is near identical (all apart from the breadcrumbs) All instances of the page point to the same canonical URL We are using the longer URL in our internal architecture/link building to show this preference My questions are; Will this harm our visibility? Aside from editing the sitemap, are there any other signals we could give Google? Thanks

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tomcraig86
                    0
                  • coremediadesign

                    Login redirect 302

                    Ok - anyone knows what to do with the temporary redirect to the login page? In our e-commerce system we have a checkout page, which requires user to be logged in - if they are not, we redirect them to the login page using simple php header("Locaiton: url"). This however has been found as a Warning as it's a temporary redirect. I can't really put there permanent redirect for obvious reasons so if someone could give me some clue on this situation that would be much appreciated.

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | coremediadesign
                    0
                  • seomasters

                    Cookies and redirects - what are the negative effects?

                    I am advising a client who wants to streamline their online customers experience through the use of cookies. The first time someone visits mysite.com, they will visit the normal index page, and on that page will be asked to identify themselves as a Personal or Business customer - and taken through to a relevant page. This will result in a cookie being added. The next time they come back to mysite.com, the cookie will automatically direct them from the index page to mysite.com/personal/ or mysite.com/business/. My question is, what are the SEO implications of this, especially given the fact the index page is their primary landing page for almost all organic traffic? Bots I realise that googlebot etc do not store cookies, so this should result in no change from the bots perspective (i.e. no redirect) but is it that simple? In effect we'll be showing the bot one thing and second time + visitors something else. Is this not effectively cloaking? All advice gratefully received!

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seomasters
                    0
                  • lhc67

                    Keyword-Rich Domains - Redirect?

                    Hi, Mozzers- I have a client that has a bunch of pretty nice keyword-rich domain names. Their traffic and rankings are good. They provide legal services in the Chicago area. I have lots of good content that I could use to start a blog using a domain like keyword,keyword-blog.com. Good idea? Currently I have a resources area on their website but feel like this area could be getting a little bloated and some news-related stuff isn't really appropriate. 2 Questions: Should I use one of the decent domains for a blog and build up the rankings, traffic, and link to the main site?  Or is this lots of work for little payout? Both sites would be hosted in the cloud. Some of the domain names are related to their name, others are keyword or geo-targeted. Would it be wise to setup 301 redirects going to their website? Pros/cons? If you need additional info, please PM me for details. Thank you, friends! LHC

                    Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lhc67
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  • Digital Marketers
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.