Too many broken links which i am unable to understand

[hith234]

Dear All,

There are some links which are cropping up again and again in my google webmaster tools. I am using wordpress and genesis theme. Both are upgraded to the latest version. But there are 3 types of errors being created as mentioned below.

tag/target-markets/%E2%80%9Dhttp:/www.wordpress.org%E2%80%9D

tag/smartphone-apps/%E2%80%9Dhttp:/%E2%80%9Dhttp:/www.marketing91.com%E2%80%9D

how-to-maintain-customer-interest/%3C?php%20the_permalink()%20?%3E

As you can see, either wordpress.orf or marketing91.com or php%20 the _permalink is being added at the end of URLs and they are breaking. This cannot be seen in google index. But this indicates wrong coding and due to it my traffic is regularly dropping. Can you tell me what is causing the break in URL like above.

My website is http://www.marketing91.com

Thanks in advance. This has being going on for 2 months Hope someone comes out with the right answer.

[CleverPhD]

I just ran a spider on your site and saw no 404s from that crawl so there were no links on your site pointing to the URLs.  Also, like you said, those URLs are not in the Google index.   I checked your sitemap.  You reference a zipped sitemap in your robots.txt  http://www.marketing91.com/sitemap.xml.gz  vs http://www.marketing91.com/sitemap.xml but not sure that this makes a difference.

You need to trace back to when you saw the errors showing up and see if you did anything to your site at the time. Did all of this show up when you updated themes or made some other change?   It may be that you used to have these URLs on the old version of the site and when you made changes the pages went away and now Google is trying to change them.  In that case, it may not be the 404 errors that are causing the problem, but something else when you updated.

It may be that you need to setup some "Catch all" 301 redirects so that when garbage gets added to the end of your URLs they 301 to the correct page.  That would help clean this up, but not sure this is the reason you are losing traffic from Google.

Honestly, these are just guesses and so I hope that they may trigger something else for you to check.

Good luck.

[hith234]

Adding so many 301's to these pages is a bit difficult because a) every week there are more and more of these pages. there are 50 such errors in a single day. and the same is repeated every week. b) too many 301s might also hamper my site and google might look at it negatively

BUT more importantly, DO YOU THINK that this is a reason for traffic drops? These links are not being indexed by google. Neither are they linked from anywhere. DO you think that these links are transient and may pass away with time?

your reply will be appreciated.

[Everett]

These look like simple broken links, often caused by using relative paths incorrectly or forgetting to include http:// when linking to a website (e.g. which will then make the link look like this to a spider http://www.yourdopmain.com/www.someotherdomain.com.</p>
<p>In your case it looks like there are some HTML URL encoding issues too. <strong>%E2 %80 %9D</strong> is a string used to encode a right quotation mark, and <strong>%E2 %80 %9C</strong> is a string used to encode a left quotation mark.</p>
<p>I'm going to assume that your content management system is adding this code, possibly when content is being copied and pasted from another CMS, word processing software, website builder, etc...</p>
<p>You can fix it by replacing that code with a standard ASCII )

  which will then make the link look like this to a spider http://www.yourdopmain.com/www.someotherdomain.com.</p>
<p>In your case it looks like there are some HTML URL encoding issues too. <strong>%E2 %80 %9D</strong> is a string used to encode a right quotation mark, and <strong>%E2 %80 %9C</strong> is a string used to encode a left quotation mark.</p>
<p>I'm going to assume that your content management system is adding this code, possibly when content is being copied and pasted from another CMS, word processing software, website builder, etc...</p>
<p>You can fix it by replacing that code with a standard ASCII )