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How does google view this 404 url in a backlink?

         

meelosh

12:58 pm on Jul 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I had a mini heart attack this morning going through the usual WMT checks on my sites to find that one of the better sites has its home page listed 404 in crawl errors. Sure enough clicking on the link WMT has which is http://www.example.com/ comes up 404 however the page is there. so i checked the source code and it was really http://www.example.com/%20 so there is a space at the end but in WMT it show http://www.example.com/ with no space. The link is coming from a very bad looking asian site that i am assuming is doing a bit of scraping but i cannot read it...anyway i do not want to do any redirecting to capture it..my concern is does google see this url as the same as my home page and that it cannot find it or does it see it for what it is a different url as it has a space added to the end....maybe just paranoid but would like to know..thanks

tedster

6:03 pm on Jul 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I've seen this "extra character problem" a lot with automated scraper links.

First, there is no issue created for your site when external links point to a 404 URL on your domain. If they are coming from a good, trusted site, it just means that your site is getting no benefit. That's a situation where you might want to do a redirect. Google WMT shows those 404 links only for your information, and they are not saying you should fix them or you'll be in trouble.

And second, Google is getting very good at ignoring backlinks from spam sites. I was just doing a backlink analysis yesterday for a site that had 100,000 of them coming from really dodgy, really spammy domains. The website itself showed no search traffic problems. They were doing just as well before those links showed up as they are now.

meelosh

6:29 pm on Jul 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



thanks for getting back tedster...google always showed these type links with the /%20 and now it seems to not add it in the WMT...there seems to be allot of changes going on in the WMT of late..we will see..thanks for easy my paranoia

Planet13

8:37 pm on Jul 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



The link is coming from a very bad looking asian site that i am assuming is doing a bit of scraping but i cannot read it...


Can you use something like google translate to read that site?

Robert Charlton

9:11 pm on Jul 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I've had problems with space and other characters at the end of urls on even legitimate backlinks that we couldn't get the linking sites to change. It's good to have rewrites for such situations built into your canonicalization code.

See these threads for potential canonical issues and how to pre-emptively correct them...

A guide to fixing duplicate content & URL issues on Apache
How to canonicalize all of your URLs with a single redirect
http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3208525.htm
[webmasterworld.com...]

Canonical URL Issues - including some new ones
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3718246.htm
[webmasterworld.com...]