strange links scanned from google - extra slashes

..funny thing.... no such links exist

[omoutop]

Hi all and thanks for any help in advance.

Recently it came to my attention something strange about some links the google had scanned from my site.

While the original link was:
http://www.example.com/some-page.htm
the google sitemap suggested it was:
http://www.example.com/folder////some-page.htm

Now half the site is made with php (dynamic creation of links) and apache's mod_rewrite (to construct the htm pages and virtual folders out of the php pages).

According to the keywords ("some", "page", "folder"), I know in what page the "strange" link should appear.
After close examination of the dynamic page, and after thorough tests (using all sorts of possible outcomes), I didn't observed any strange behavior, or error in creating these links.

Now, the error link scanned by the Google can only be created by one (1) specific page only, unique for the specific keywords. Yet such link isn't appearing at all on the page (and not in the source code also - i have checked for possible blank links).

Can anyone have any suggestions on what to look for? Or if this is some mis-behavior of Google? Or anything else that might prove usufull? Again thanks for any info/insight that you might share with me.

[edited by: tedster at 9:28 am (utc) on Feb. 9, 2007]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]

[bwnbwn]

we get them as well in dynamic sites and static sites got to do something with the bot error I quit worring about it. They will go away

[g1smd]

Check out any redirects that you have in place.

A redirect "generates" a target URL.

If that target URL responds "200 OK" then the content at that URL gets indexed.

[MThiessen]

http://www.example.com/folder////some-page.htm

I had this problem once, drove me crazy till I found out why it happened.

It can from internal relational link errors.

for instance doing a .././ when all I needed was a ../ Since I switched later to a base tag, I couldn't find the problem because all the links with bad relation links resolved, making them NOT look broken. They looked broken to google though.

I isolated this using the Dreamweaver sitemap plugin. It identified every single one of them and when I fixed it, google stopped showing the // in the links.

Check all your relational links.

[omoutop]

g1smd: we don't have ny redirects in the static pages (although we got plenty in the dynamic ones).

MThiessen: this sounds logical.... i will follow your advise and check the internal links of the static pages (the dynamic pages use absolute paths for their links since we rely heavily on mod_rewrite)

Thanks again for the hints.

[g1smd]

How about redirects in your .htaccess file?

[omoutop]

well we have some htaccess redirects, but since you mentioned it, i have checked them and none refers to my problematic pages... so I guess I am clean from that side.

[MrSpeed]

Run Xenu's Link Sleuth on your site to see if there are any "leaks" internally causing it. No matter how clean I think my rewrites are I find something.

[omoutop]

I run Xenu before postinmg here :)
thats why i am so confused..... currently i am in the procss of changing all the relative links to absolute paths