site.com/./page/index.html Broken link with Xenu - Google?

[jaffstar]

When I run a broken link scan it reports the following as a broken link:

site.com/../page/index.html I am referring to the /../

When I try the link in IE , it works fine.

Does Google see this as valid or broken as this represents 35% of a site I am analyzing.

[Brett_Tabke]

Xenu has historically be challenged with various html errors.

Get the page to validate and then rerun the test - I bet it works.

Also a better browser test would be to run it through Safari and/or Chrome. Part of the guts of G's indexer is borrowed from webkit.

[tedster]

site.com/../page/index.html I am referring to the /../

Does your href attribute include all four character? i.e. href="/ ../page/index.html"

[g1smd]

This is one of the dangers inherent in using the ../ notation for URLs in links.

I am currently looking at a site where pages in the root of the site link to other pages in the root of the site using href="../otherpage.html" styled links.

The links are like this because those pages used to be located in a folder but the pages were moved to the root. When the pages were moved, the links were not adjusted. They now resolve as "example.com/../somepage.html". Some browsers ignore the .. in the path while others do not. For those that do, the right pages are served.

Fix the links, and validate the code. The problems will vanish.

[jaffstar]

href="/ ../page/index.html"

It's coded exactly like that.

I ran a W3C on the URL and go the following:

400 Bad Request

So guys, the question is google accepting these URL's ?

[tedster]

With a space in it? Not likely. They're at least going to encode the space character.

Try typing the URL directly into the Google search box but preceded by your domain name like this: example.com/ ../page/index.html That should tell you something.

[jaffstar]

Sorry, to clarify. No space in the URL, just /../ .

[tedster]

Sorry, my bad there. Still, do the test. I doubt that it will give any results - unless your server is resolving the URL example.com/../page/index.html - and from what you say, it's giving a 404 Not Found.

[jaffstar]

Hi, just a question.

Google DOES truncate long urls so have the beginning and the end. Therefore you can see valid long links with /../ the difference in our example is the /../. is in the source code.

[tedster]

If it's in the source code, then you need to fix it. There's no way we can expect any search engine to figure out the missing characters

[aakk9999]

Hi, just a question.

Google DOES truncate long urls so have the beginning and the end. Therefore you can see valid long links with /../ the difference in our example is the /../. is in the source code.

I think you are referring to URLs shown as a green line in Google SERPs, where in some cases long URLs are shown with ../ or /../ (and sometimes even multiples of these).

These green URLs are NOT clickable - they are there just for information to visitor to where they would be going if they click on the title of this listing result. Shortening of these long URLs is for presentation only.

If you hover over the blue title of such SERP result, you will see that the link in fact points to a complete URL and not to URLs with ../ or /../