Mobile app version of vmapp.org
Login or Join
Kevin317

: What is adding frog characters to my URLs? While browsing the "Crawl Errors" section of Google Webmaster Tools, I discovered a set of very strange 500 errors in reference to my site: I was

@Kevin317

Posted in: #GoogleSearchConsole #HttpCode500 #Unicode

While browsing the "Crawl Errors" section of Google Webmaster Tools, I discovered a set of very strange 500 errors in reference to my site:



I was able to track down what these characters are, and apparently they are the first two characters in the Unicode Private Use Area. My font just happened to map them to a frog wearing a tiny crown, and a symbol that resembles the numeral 7.

These symbols only appear on the addresses of non-HTML files; office documents, PDFs, etc. - but they do not just appear in the file name.

Where are these symbols coming from, and is there any way I can get rid of them so Google can properly crawl my site?

Some background information:


Using Web Server running WS2K3 with IIS6 and PHP 5.3.8
Site encoding is UTF-8
These symbols don't appear on the page, or in the source

10.01% popularity Vote Up Vote Down


Login to follow query

More posts by @Kevin317

1 Comments

Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best

 

@Marchetta884

It's only a guess, but one possibility is that someone else is hotlinking to your files with some broken code. I know that whenever I've had dodgy requests to my sites I've always been able to track it down to someone else's borked link. (It's really irritating that spiders don't include Http-Referer headers to make it easier for us to identify the source of these URLs).

10% popularity Vote Up Vote Down


Back to top | Use Dark Theme