Replacing %23 with # in incoming links

I had some url requests show up in my google sitemaps for one of my sites with "404 Not found" errors for a bunch of urls that had "%23comment-155" looking urls instead of "#comment-155"

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The Urlencode RewriteRule Goal

So I had to redirect incoming links that contained

/article.html%23comment-155

to

/article.html#comment-155

The Solution

RewriteRule ^(.*).html([^c]+)comment-(.+)$ http://www.site.com/$1.html#comment-$3 [R=301,L,NE]

Requests from apache log files

"GET /htaccess/speed-up-sites-with-htaccess-caching.html%23comment-155 HTTP/1.1" 200 2617 "-"

After the fix

"GET /htaccess/speed-up-sites-with-htaccess-caching.html%23comment-155 HTTP/1.1" 301 683 "-"
"GET /htaccess/speed-up-sites-with-htaccess-caching.html HTTP/1.1" 200 24690 "-"

Result

Users browser is redirected using a Search Engine Friendly 301 Redirect to the correct URL, including anchor!

More Info

For more discussion of this problem check out http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum92/5188.htm

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Reader Comments

1. Keno ~May 1, 2010 @ 8:54 am

   how do i display the title of an article in the URL with .htaccess replacing spaces with _ underscore and special characters. thanks

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