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    4. 301 Redirection and apostrophes in URLs

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    301 Redirection and apostrophes in URLs

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • Seamoose
      Seamoose last edited by

      Hi

      I am experiencing trouble getting any redirects with apostrophes in the URLs to 301 redirect in order to eliminate 404 errors.

      I have tried replacing the instance of the apostrophe in the source URL field to %27 and variations of this but to no avail.

      The site is a wordpress site (the old URLS are legacies from the old Business Catalyst site) and I am using the redirection plug in. I have gone into some detail with a helpful soul here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/how-to-deal-with-apostrophes-in-source-url but unfortunately to no result.

      If anyone has any idea how to solve this puzzle I would be grateful for the help.

      Example: http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1%E2%80%93_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/

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

        Hey Paul, and thanks for the reply.

        This certainly feels like it is helping me close in on the mystery (more likely my knowledge gap!) however, I am getting some odd results. I think maybe I need to wade through all my attempts at 301-ing these troublesome old URLs and see if I have done something weird which might to be blame but anyway, for the record, here is the new mystery:

        When I pop in the following:

        http://www.tesselaars.com/blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1-_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/

        I get redirected to

        http://www.tesselaars.com/valentines-day-statistics-2013/

        I can only figure I must have entered a 301 of this nature, which seems odd as it's a different post, but hey, after five million 301s it is possible!

        I will check that out and see if I can get a clean and clear result and report back. Thanks for your help 🙂

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

          The version with URL entities you posted is almost right, Seamus, but there's a a weird combination of entities around the "hyphen surrounded by two underscores". For some reason, this is showing as %E2%80%93 when it should just be a - (There's no need to encode a hyphen as it's a standard URL character)

          Try this as the source URL, with the redirect set as NOT a regular expression:

          /blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Online_Marketing_for_Florists_Part_1-_A_Website_You_Won%27t_Regret/

          I've tested that and it's working on my test install. If it doesn't work for you, there may be an encoding issue on your Windows server that's different from what I see on Linux/Apache.

          Lemme know if that works?

          Paul

          P.S. Here's the Source URL for the second example used in the WordPress Forum post:

          /_blog/Inside_Flowers/post/Valentine%27s_Day_Statistics_2013/

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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