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
-
Do you still loose 15% of value of inbound links when you redirect your site from http to https (so all inbound links to http are being redirected to https version)?
I know when you redesign your on website, you loose about 15% internally due to the 301 redirects (see moz article: https://moz.com/blog/accidental-seo-tests-how-301-redirects-are-likely-impacting-your-brand), but I'm wondering if that also applies to value of inbound links when you redirect your http://www.sitename.com to https://www.sitename.com. I appreciate your help!
Technical SEO | | JBMediaGroup0 -
4xx fix
Hi
Technical SEO | | gavinr
I have quite a lot of 4xx errors on our site. The 4xx occurred because I cleaned poor URLs that had commas etc in them so its the old URLs that now 4xx. There are no links to the URLs that 4xx. What is the best way of rectifying this issue of my own making?! Thanks
Gavin0 -
Are sitewide links bad for SEO?
I have 11 real estate sites and have had links from one to another for about 7 years but someone just suggested me to take them all out because I might get penalized or affected by penguin. My main site was affected on July of 2012 and organic visits have dropped 43%...I've been working on many aspects of my SEO but it's been difficult to come back. Any suggestions are very welcome, thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | mbulox0 -
Index page 404 error
Crawl Results show there is 404 error page which is index.htmk **it is under my root, ** http://mydomain.com/index.htmk I have checked my index page on the server and my index page is index.HTML instead of index.HTMK. Please help me to fix it
Technical SEO | | semer0 -
RSS Feed Errors in Google
We recently (2 months ago) launched RSS feeds for the category pages on our site. Last week we started seeing error pages in Webmaster Tools' Crawl Errors report pop up for feeds of old pages that have been deleted from the site, deleted from the sitemap, and not in Google's index since long before we launched the RSS feeds. Example: www.mysite.com/super-old-page/feed/ I checked and both the URL for the feed and the URL for the actual page are returning 404 statuses. www.mysite.com/super-old-page/ is also showing up in our Crawl Errors. Its been deleted for months but Webmaster Tools is very slow to remove the page from their Crawl Error report. Where is Google finding these feeds that never existed?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
Wordpress SEO Errors - Any advice?
Hi all! My site is on the WP platform and I'm having a crawl error. Wondering if you guys could possibly help me figure out what's going on? I have a good number of 404 errors where the links seems to be appended and I can't figure out why. I've scoured my individual posts and cannot seem to find the broken link? The crawl error looks a bit like this: http://preciousthingsphotography.com/2007/12/10/chicago-family-photographer-welcome/http:%2F%2Fpreciousthingsphotography.com%2F2007%2F12%2F10%2Fchicago-family-photographer-welcome%2F You can see that my original link is somehow being doubled with the slashes being replaced? This is happening on all of my posts. Any ideas as to what could be going on? Thanks so much!
Technical SEO | | ptpgen0 -
Adding Google +1 To My Site
This may seem like a silly question, but I had my site designed by a third party and I don't know how to find this info. I want to add Google +1 button to my site. I've already added the script that makes it work in my , but don't know how to add the to the part of my site I'd like the icon to appear. If you take a look at my site, http://www.youdrivethesuccess.com/, you will see the twitter and facebook icons that follow you around the site in the top right of the page. I'd like to drop in the +1 right next to them, but I don't know how to get to it. How do I access this on the server? What section of my FTP do these lil icons live? A folder? Any direction is greatly appreciated...thanks.
Technical SEO | | brentmitchell0 -
Does the Referral Traffic from a Link Influence the SEO Value of that Link?
If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO? Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic? Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links? 5343313-zelda-rogers-albums-zelda-pictures-duh-what-else-would-they-be-picture3672t-link-looks-so-lonely.jpg Sad%20little%20link.jpg
Technical SEO | | glennfriesen1