Will crawl errors like domainname.com/%22 affect ranking?

[johnlim9988]

HI,

I signed up webmater tool, there are crawl erros like

domainname.com/%22 error.

What is this error domainname.com/%22?

What did %22 represent?

Why have this error? somebody else link to us this way?

Will this affect our keywords ranking in google?

Thanks.

[tedster]

That's a bit odd -- %22 is the hex value for a straight double quote. I'm not sure how someone would accidentally add a quote to the href attribute for your domain. Some kind of programming error somewhere.

[johnlim9988]

webmaster tool told me it has such error. But I cannot find our who links to me like that. Or any other possibility?

Will such error affect our site keywords ranking?

[tedster]

No, one bad URL like that in a link somewhere should not affect your rankings.

[johnlim9988]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3365096.htm [webmasterworld.com] by tedster - 2:48 am on June 12, 2007 (EST -4)

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Hi,

We sign up Webmaster Tools and found a lot of crawl erros.

Like 4 HTTP errors (403 (Forbidden))
25 Not found erros (404 (Not found))
45198 URLs restricted by robots.txt

Will such errors affect our site rankings?

Thanks!

[tedster]

I just noticed your other post and moved it into this thread. Any negative effect for you has already been happeneing - you just now signed up to get the report.

You should understand these errors, but some crawl errors are common for a site, and having a few does not affect your ranking significantly. However, if those errors are for URLs that you thought were working properly, then there may be something you can fix and derive benefit from.

The robots.txt number sounds pretty high to me - unless your website is very large. You or your webmaster should easily be able to check that file and see if something is wrong..

[johnlim9988]

One line in the robots.txt is used to forbidden robot to crawl cgi-bin

so in webmaster tool we can see that there are 45198 URLs restricted by robots.txt

Almost all the restricted URLs are like as following,

[mydomain.com...]

Will this affect ranking?

Thanks!

[phranque]

did you check your access logs for "%22"?
you can see if it was unreferred or not.
this would tell you if it was a simple typo in a browser or came from a referring document and if so the referring url.
the browser will typically change example.com/" to example.com/%22 before sending the http GET request.