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

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

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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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