She managed to confuse Google...

Lille Ulven

Hi

I have a couple of Galleries which have Titles like "Te Ika-a-Māui" or "Black & White" while the Links are "Te-IkaaMaui" or "BlackWhite" just because I figured typing a link with special characters if you don't have them on your keyboard is painful to say the least, yet I do want my Gallery titles to be written correctly...
Apparently Google believes that this link "http://www.lilleulven.com/TravelPhotos/New-Zealand-Photos/Te-IkaaMāui/i-xR8Hw44" exists while the true link would be "http://www.lilleulven.com/TravelPhotos/New-Zealand-Photos/Te-IkaaMaui/i-xR8Hw44".

So google now throws quite a few 404 crawling errors at me by using those kind of wrong links... which usually I would be able to correct if there was a possibility for adding 303-redirections.
Question is... how do I fix that now (or how do I teach google to behave )?

Any ideas?
Thanks in advance!

Lille Ulven

docwalker

The bad news is that it does take time for Google to re-crawl your site and find changes. The good news is that it looks like it has already found the corrected version.
[IMG]https://www.evernote.com/shard/s161/sh/dfbb443c-fea3-40bf-b2ce-3ec3083ff3e0/b704dab35bdb3e3ee8dc8232f187678a/deep/0/te-ika-a-māui-lilleulven---Google-Search.png[/IMG]

One way that Google appears to index bad links is when it finds them in posts like this. Notice result 3 is a link to this post. The crawler may index that link even though is not valid. Hopefully once Google sees that the link is a 404, it should eventually stop showing it in the results.

Some users have found that using Google Webmaster Tools you can request Google to stop indexing certain parts of your site if the links are invalid.

Lille Ulven

Thanks docwalker that helped me a lot!

Lille Ulven

Lille Ulven

And now I actually found out why google got confused in the first place...
I got caught up in spelling stuff right when typing... which works fine in texts, unfortunately if you have links and have to "spell them wrong for everybody else to be able to spell them right" and than spell them right in the first place (in a forum) things get æhm wrong after all.
Anybody confused now?
OK to make things simple:
In Maori Te Ika-a-Māui is spelled with that straight line over the a in Māui... but on my website as a link it was not (making it easier to type the URL). Yet when I gave a link to the website I spelled it correct after Maori-spelling-conventions but well that made it wrong for the link...
Anyway to make life easier for everybody I have now changed all those links (and those with uppercase letters in between - as we discovered in another thread that having an uppercase letter somewhere after position one in your link means your visitors have to write that link with that uppercase, a lowercase letter will lead to a 404 error page) to make it hopefully much easier to remember where to go.