Adsense slow to load articles with non standard characters

[jdancing]

I recently bought a content site and have noticed content submitted with non standard characters in the title take a long time for adsense to load.

For example the title:
"Handbags - Tips on Finding Great Handbags"

Is translated to:
"Handbags_%96_Tips_on_Finding_Great_Handbags" in the URL

I can fix the URL structure moving forward but there are a several hundred past articles with a similar syntax issue - too many to 301 redirect in the .htaccess.

Anyone know of a trick to get adsense to load on articles with these %xx non-standard characters?

[jdancing]

Perhaps this issue is unique to me?

[netmeg]

I wouldn't use non standard characters, so it's a non-issue for me.

[jdancing]

Yes I agree. Moving forward URLs are created the leave out the non-standard characters, I was asking anyone knows a way or why google adsense has trouble loading with non-standard characters in the URL?

Is this a known issue?

Is there a trick to get adsense to load quickly on a url such as: ....Handbags_%96_Tips_on_Finding_Great_Handbags

I tried adding:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

But this did not help.

[netmeg]

Um, why don't you just FIX the URL? If it's not ranking all that well, it won't matter, and if it is, put in a 301.

I've never heard of this issue, but I don't know why anyone would leave an URL like that anyway.

[jdancing]

Um, why don't you just FIX the URL?

I am not talking about one URL, I would guess there are around ~1,000. I have fixed the creation of new URLs moving forward.

I am pretty sure there are too many to 301 redirect in the .htaccess - my .htaccess would be huge.

I can run a script to 'fix' all the URLs. However, the page would lose the indexing until it went 404 then reindexed under the clean URL. Then I worry the new URL would be mistakenly tagged as duplicate content, putting the site at risk. Currently google seems to really like the site and it's content.

Quite the delema. I was hoping some adsense guru had an idea for a quick fix.

It seems mostly hyphens, quotes and sometimes dashes in the title that were converted to non-standard characters by the site's script in the past that are giving Adsense has the problem loading.

My thinking is if I could get adsense to load properly on these pages my earnings would take a nice jump.

BTW: I am testing a non-adsense network at the moment on this site and notice the ads from this network load instantly on the same pages.

[phranque]

create a script to redirect requests with non-standard characters in THE_REQUEST and internally rewrite all requested urls with non-standard characters to this script.

[netmeg]

FWIW I have migrated ecommerce sites with thousands of 301 redirects in htaccess without issue.

But phranque's idea is probably the most efficient.

AdSense is contextual (more or less) which means the bots have to be able to properly crawl your URLs. You could test them in GWT to see what they look like to Googlebot.

But to avoid problems with AdSense AND in the organic SERPs, you should fix them once and for all.

[jdancing]

Thanks guys. That's what I'm talking about! I'll start on the script. I agree, this needs to be fixed.

[lucy24]

I am pretty sure there are too many to 301 redirect in the .htaccess - my .htaccess would be huge.

For heaven's sake, you don't need to redirect each URL separately :) Depending on how many characters are involved-- how many different ones, and how many in a single URL-- you'll need either a script detour, as above, or just a few lines in htaccess.

But you have a double problem: Somehow you've come out with URLs encoded in 1252 (windows codepage). The 9x range shouldn't occur at all, ever, and the en dash character (not a hyphen) likewise shouldn't occur in an URL.

Redirecting is fine for URLs that already exist. But you also have to do whatever it takes to ensure that nothing in the URL-generating process uses 1252. Fine-tooth-comb your pages-- I assume you're dealing with user-generated content? --and the function that converts content into URLs, and make sure every single step is rigorously locked into the same encoding. UTF-8 is obviously the best choice. And then write a subroutine to intercept any non-ASCII characters before they ever get to be URLs.