can someone tell me what this is?

[tonynoriega]

google says i have this 404 error, but i dont know what the heck all the garbage in the URL is...

http://www.example.com/%3Cstrong%3Esuper%3C/strong%3E-cool-%3Cstrong%3Eproducts%3C/strong%3E/index.asp

thanks

[edited by: encyclo at 6:12 pm (utc) on Nov. 29, 2006]
[edit reason] switched to example.com [/edit]

[coopster]

You need to "decode" the url string. Here you go:

http://www.example.com/<strong>super</strong>-cool-<strong>products</strong>/index.asp

[tonynoriega]

is that ASCII code for those characters?

i tried to google the %3C, but no luck...

thanks

[rocknbil]

Try again, but search for 'ASCII character set', you will find lots of pages with conversions to both hexideximal and octal equivalents. :-)

[coopster]

Exactly. And the syntax and semantics of URL Character Encoding can be found in RFC1738 [ietf.org].

[Archer74]

thats hex code isnt it?

%30 is <
%3E is >

[coopster]

... as mentioned by rocknbil. The less than sign is actually %3C though, not %30 -- a minor correction ;)

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Archer74.

[tonynoriega]

so my question now is...

how can you add attributes to a URL?

hence, <strong> portion of url </strong>

apparently google says, once upon a time, my site had this URL?

any ideas...

[encyclo]

It's the result of a broken link, for example missing the closing bracket and quote mark in the markup:

<a href="http://www.example.com/<strong>super</strong>...

which should read:

<a href="http://www.example.com/[b]">[/b]<strong>super</strong>...

If the broken link is on your site (check the referer string in your logs) then you can correct the error, if it is on another site, so can ask them to correct their link (don't hold your breath) or try to redirect visitors to the correct URL.

[coopster]

I'll bet it was a typo during development. If you accidentally hit a sequence of keys in some WYSIWYG editors it will automatically drop in begin and end elements on a selected word. "Ctrl B" is a standard in many WYSIWYG editors for bolding (strong) a selection.

[tonynoriega]

ohhh jeez...ill bet it is on another site, becuase i searched my entire site for any key elements in that URL string and nothing was returned...

this will be fun...

maybe i can google it and find it somewhere...

thanks everyone....i learned something new..

[Candid India]

Please decode it again i m giving you a link as an example.

http://www.example.com/<strong>super</strong>-cool-<strong>products</strong>/

[tedster]

You cannot put html mark-up directly into the URL. Try something like this:

<a href="http://www.example.com/super-cool-products/>http://www.example.com/<strong>super</strong>-cool-<strong>products</strong>/</a>