Webmaster Tools showing redirect errors on encoded URLs

To URL encode or not?

[Drew_Black]

I searched this forum for similar issues but couldn't find anything. I apologize if this has been covered previously.

I'm noticing something strange being reported in Google's Webmaster tools. I've submitted a Site Map with thousands of dynamic pages that are accessed through encoded URLs. Since these pages are dynamic I have logic in place to make sure that the "correct" URL is being used. If not then it will 301 redirect to the properly formatted URL.

Example encoded URL in the sitemap:
/mysite.com/some_product_name%28large-blue%29.htm

Googlebot instead requests this URL:
/mysite.com/some_product_name(large-blue).htm

My internal linking structure uses the URL provided in the sitemap. It's the "correct" URL from my perspective so when Googlebot hits the non-encoded URL it gets a 301 to the "correct" page. This ends up being reported as a redirect error in Webmaster Tools.

The only URLs that get listed as redirect errors have characters not in [A-Za-z0-9], dashes and underscores.

Anyone else run into this? I'd like to fix the redirect error problems to be sure these pages are being indexed.

[tedster]

Definitely restrict those odd characters from appearing in rewritten url. If you're working from a database field, you may have a good bit of work ahead of you to catch all the problems, but it's well worth it. I've been doing this kind of project with a client site and the rewards are there.

The only URLs that get listed as redirect errors have characters not in [A-Za-z0-9], dashes and underscores.

That's exactly the best practice. I suggest you "Accept no substitutes". In fact, I suggest you eliminate the underscores too - not because of errors but because they are indexed as a character in their own right, rather than as a separator between two discrete words.