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    4. 4XX Errors - Adding %5c%5c to Links

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    4XX Errors - Adding %5c%5c to Links

    Technical SEO
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    • potpiegirl
      potpiegirl last edited by

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • potpiegirl
        potpiegirl @irvingw last edited by

        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

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • potpiegirl
          potpiegirl @potpiegirl last edited by

          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

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Jinx14678
            Jinx14678 @potpiegirl last edited by

            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

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • potpiegirl
              potpiegirl @Jinx14678 last edited by

              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!!!

              Jinx14678 potpiegirl 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • irvingw
                irvingw last edited by

                somewhere in your url coding you added backslash instead of slash which is not valid.

                potpiegirl 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • Jinx14678
                  Jinx14678 last edited by

                  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.

                  potpiegirl 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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