404 crawl errors from "tel:" link?

[EugeneF]

I am seeing thousands of 404 errors.  Each of the urls is like this:

abc.com/abc123/tel:1231231234

Everything is normal about that url except the "/tel:1231231234"

these urls are bad with the tel: extension, they are good without it.

The only place I can find this character string is on each page we have this code which is used for Iphones and such.  What are we doing wrong?

Code:

Phone: <a href="[tel:1231231234](tel:7858411943)"> (123) 123-1234a>

[loopyal]

Hi EugeneF

The problem with tel: is that most browsers don't know what to do with that, so they see it as a URL relative to your site, and when you try http://www.google.com/tel:1231231234  there is no such thing and of course, you get a 404 error.

So here is another gotcha that we will all have to cater for in our robots files and .htaccess files.

What you need to do, to handle that, is to detect that you are dealing with a smart browser that understands what to do with it, and only display those anchor links to those browsers.

The upside, of course, is that either robots or hopefully, real people are clicking on your phone links.

The downside is that if they are real people and they get a 404 error, you are giving them a bad surfing experience.

[loopyal]

Here is another way you could handle it, in a separate program that detects a smartphone.

For a phone that can handle it, you do a redirect and for one that doesn't, you do something else

(obviously, I haven't tested this, but this way also has the upside that it tracks the clicks.

If your site uses this style of URL
Call 555 555 5555

Or this if you handle URLs this way
Call 555 555 5555