http://domain.com/%22http://domain.com/web-page-on-site%22

Do you guys know what would cause google to be picking up these types
of links. IT just started mid-August and has been going through until
right now. All errors are being classified as "4xx error" and once you
click on those links, it goes to a 403 forbidden error page.

This issue has resulted in about 80% drop in google referral traffic,
so finding a solution is very important to our livelihood. Please help
if you have any expertise in this area.

How you know that this is the "cause" of your drop?

Besides speculating about how this happened or where these links came
from, why not focus on dealing with them?

On Sep 12, 3:19 pm, Robbo wrote:

On Sep 12, 3:21 pm, Robbo wrote:

Example Absolute link:
<a href="http://domain.com/products/catalog.php">

Example Relative links:
<a href="../products/catalog.php">
<a href="../../catalog.php">

The example that you gave was:
http://domain.com/%22http://domain.com/web-page-on-site%22

It __looks as though__ it might have been formed by an error in a
Relative link OR in converting a Relative link to an Absolute URL.

Often, Relative links are used in the HTML coding which are converted
to Absolute URLs by the user agent browser or the search engine
crawler.

%22 is the URL encoded representation of a double-quote ("), so it
looks like either you have some links that are incorrect within your
site or we are interpreting a link like that somewhere. To find out
more, it would be great to know the exact URLs that you are seeing
like this -- that way, the users (and Googlers :-)) here could take a
look and try to figure it out.

Hope it helps & hope to hear back from you soon!

thank you for the kind welcome. I hope you guys can help us get back
on track. For some odd reason Google bot hasn't come to spider since
the 8th of this month, so all our new content is getting neglected.
It's a little painful, to say the least.

Anyway, here are HTTP error URLs showing up on our log:

http://www.bastardly.com/%22http://www.bastardly.com/2008-amanda-byne...

There are about 56,000+ of those error URLs. Since Friday, I've had my
server people place an automatic redirect for such incoming URLs, so
you won't see it going to the forbidden page, BUT the linking error
still resides within our template. If someone can help us resolve this
& get googlebot back to spidering the site, I'd really appreciate it.

THank you!

On Sep 13, 10:10 am, JohnMu wrote:

I'd try a "find replace" in your template for
http://www.bastardly.com/%22http://www.bastardly.com/ and replace it
with http://www.bastardly.com/

Hope that helps and best of luck!

-Brian

On Sep 14, 10:34 pm, bloodylamer wrote:

It looks like we might be picking up these URLs through your RSS feed
( http://www.bastardly.com/rss.xml ), where links within the content
are double-encoded, eg:

&lt;a href=&amp;#34;http://www.bastardly.com/2008-bar-rafaeli-moet-
chandon-star-of-the-night-0914&amp;#34;&gt;read more&lt;/a&gt;
should be
&lt;a href=&#34;http://www.bastardly.com/2008-bar-rafaeli-moet-chandon-
star-of-the-night-0914&#34;&gt;read more&lt;/a&gt;

("&amp;#34;" should be just "&#34;")

For what it's worth, if you view the RSS feed with Firefox, you'll see
the same broken links in the "read more" links below the article
snippets.

Thank you very much for your help. I can't believe we missed the RSS
feed! BUt yeah, I think we're royally screwed from a "google-spidering-
our-site" perspective for the foreseeable future. I just hope we don't
lose too much ground with this linking debacle.

All the best to you.

On Sep 15, 2:19 am, JohnMu wrote:

Don't worry, things will generally normalize quickly once everything
is in place :-). One thing you could do to speed things up is to 301
redirect appropriately. There is probably a way to do this in
your .htaccess file so that all of these accesses automatically get
sent to the proper URL.