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

[potpiegirl]

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

[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

[potpiegirl]

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

[Jinx14678]

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

[potpiegirl]

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!!!

[irvingw]

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

[Jinx14678]

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.