: HTTP occurring twice in a URL I ran into a website today that had two URLs and I'm completely stunned. The website, not to be specific, has a full address of http://example/cat/http://example/dog.

@Nickens628

People also often see "http" in their access logs when the forget the colon in a link to an external site. For example on the page example.com/finder/findstuff is the following HTML:

<a href="http//www.google.com/">Search Google</a>


Due to the missing colon, this will result in the visitor being sent to example.com/finder/http//www.google.com/ when clicking on the link.

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@Hamaas447

Your example URL, example/cat/http://example/dog, points to a page accessed with the http protocol, on the host example, with the path cat/http://example/dog. It's perfectly valid for the path part of a URL to contain elements that look like the protocol and hostname parts of another URL.

One relatively prominent example of a legit site using such URLs is archive.org's Wayback Machine. For example, to see what webmasters.stackexchange.com/ looked like in late 2010, you can go to web.archive.org/web/2010/https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/.

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@Sarah324

The second one can simply be a parameter in the URL.

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