I have weird sign in my URLS

Hi

I don’t what is happening, but I have odd signs in my URLs. See screenshot: http://www.screencast.com/t/3Acv9Z3vB6

I don’t know if it’s a problem with the theme. Maybe you can help?

Thank you

Hi Catalin,
It’s been a long time now that I use the Newspaper theme and this problem has never happened to me in the past. It’s new. How come?
I work on a different computer. Is possible that the issue comes from the new computer?

Hi Catalin,

Here is my URL: https://cruisingsea.com/ and browser I use is Chrome, which I’ve always been using.

Hi Catalin,

No one can see them on my website, but you can see them on Google pages. When I sear for my ranking, then I see the signs on the page like on the screenshot http://www.screencast.com/t/3Acv9Z3vB6

Basically it means a character is not ‘encoded properly’ someplace. This can happen in RSS feeds, or some elements not properly ‘escaped’ or can even be from using something like Yoast SEO and not actually auditing the meta data printed in your post source.

Also be aware Google is in midst of major overhaul moving everything to ‘mobile first’ — we’ve been seeing weird stuff like rectangle images not cropped and shown as distorted squares in Google news, where one “view” on desktop still shows desktop layout, but now using the mobile rectangle image, then another search shows the mobile first layout with rectangle image and simpler page layout ….

soooo….. if it just started it might have nothing to do with you.

The issue is more common if you’re importing content from other sources into your site, and the encoded content isn’t re-encoded to UTF-8/HTML and you get stuff like a ™ in text that should be & trade; or & #153;.

I’m noticing right now in latest versions of WordPress a funky thing when I paste in stories from MS Word, that the curly quotes, long dashes, and trademarks are not converting to HTML entities when viewed on the text/code view of post editor.

Anyway — check your problem posts to see if you perhaps have “long dashes” in your titles vs hyphens — switch to using a single ” – ” vs using a — long dash or other element.

Not sure that helped … but some two cents.

Hi Chris,

Yes thank you, it is very useful! I’ve read about the UTF-8/HTML in Google. I’ve spoken with my host and they try to resolve the problem.

It seems to be more of a WP thing than hosting thing.

If you see utf-8 in your wp-config.php file, then that’s a-okay.

If you look at the ‘page source’ for one of your posts, you can usually see exactly what is there. So, if your post is properly encoded — meaning a headline/title has an HTML entity for any high-ascii characters, then you’re fine — issue is on the side of whomever is pulling that into their system, and not much you can do about it.

Ran into this with our RSS feed recently, pulling into Java widget where the headlines were not javascript-compliant, but fine for modern HTML … we had to make custom RSS feed with the titles ‘javascript friendly encoded’ to fix that.

Nightmare! 🙂

Hi Chris,

WOW, this is really a nightmare! I really appreciate your time and effort! Thank you very much:)
My host just told me that these signs come from my All In One Seo plugin and that I have to replace a letter.
I’ll try this also. However, I will forward your note to my host, hoping it will help:)
Thank you again!