Google Sitemap Errors from a Comma in the URL

[speedshopping]

Hi,

We have an XML sitemap that has been active since 2009 with a full set of URLs that have been working fine.

However, more recently, we have noticed a lot of Crawl Errors (Not Found) coming from our Sitemaps files.

Our links are in the form of:

http://www.website.com/directory/x/filter,yes/

When looking at the links that are being recorded as "Not Found", the URL seems to be cut off at the "comma" point.

So the URL shows as:

http://www.website.com/directory/x/filter

which obviously breaks the page.

Q) Is Sitemaps having a problem encoding a comma in the URL (never had this problem before?) - has anyone else seen this problem with comma based URLs?

Kind regards,
Wesiwyg

[edited by: tedster at 6:09 pm (utc) on Dec 9, 2011]

[tedster]

We had a discussion about commas in URLs back in 2010 reference [webmasterworld.com]. At that time, no one was reporting any actual issues, but the bottom line for me was this:

Thus, only alphanumerics, the special characters "$-_.+!*'(),", and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL.

RFC 1738 - Uniform Resource Locators (URL) [faqs.org]

The comma IS on the permitted special character list and "should be" OK.

That said, I don't currently have a site that uses commas in the URL, so I can't say if any recent problems have been stirred up. Maybe someone else can chime in with a yes or no in their case.

[deadsea]

It would be safer to write the commas as %2C in your URLs like this:
[website.com...]
Your server should be able to handle urls like that with no modifications.