Backslash character %5c in URL makes relative links fail

Question

Please can anyone help? Somehow Google has indexed the page:

http://www.wiseowl.co.uk/courseware%5Cms-office.htm

This looks fine, but the page should be:

http://www.wiseowl.co.uk/courseware/ms-office.htm

All works well until you click on relative links on the page. For the first (backslash) case, these fail, as the path takes you one folder too far up the directory tree.

Our website is hosted by IIS, so no Apache style commands are possible. Has anyone any ideas?

Thx in advance

Andy

Answer 1

There are many approaches you can take to resolve this problem which are:

• Rel Canonical See: How to use rel canonical properly
• .htaccess See: Convert forward backslashes into forward slashes (Look for same header).
• noindex See: 2 main ways to prevent search engines from indexing specific pages.

Personally I would opt to use the rel canonical as this will resolve any further problems that occur from duplicate content... You could also use htaccess along side if you don't want those pages ever backlinked too, though canonical ensures that the master page receives the juice in any case.

Please note: I have added the htaccess method for readers with similar problem but use Apache, in this case you can ignore that method and just use canonical's which will do the job just superbly.