I have a directory website - I didn't want to have an id number in a URL structure so I chose to store the URLs in the database table.
For example: if http://www.example.com/my-unique-url-without-identifier/
is visited, I search for my-unique-url-without-identifier
key in the database table and then put the result based on that.
Now, some of my URL elements have special characters (single quotes, brackets etc) - I encoded them before saving into the database table.
For example: if I have to form the link for king's landing
, it is saved as /king%27s-landing/
(instead of /king's-landing/
) and all the links across the site are formed using this encoded structure.
However, google's search console is reporting high number of crawling errors and all the pages are of the type where URL is encoded with special characters (apostrophe, brackets etc). Google is somehow trying to crawl http://example.com/king's-landing/
and getting 404, which is correct behavior because I don't have /king's-landing/
in db tables. I am very sure, I only link to /king%27s-landing/
on the website and also included only encoded urls in sitemaps. Also, I have checked the "Linked from" pages and the URLs are encoded urls.
How do I resolve this problem? Is this a known bug with search console?
/kings-landing/
instead (without'
)?