Google search console is showing urls with %% in them
https://www.example.com/products/chairs/%7B%details%%7D
Not sure how they got there but CF doesnt seem to be able to understand them, Ive tried a 301 forwarding page rule but it didnt work
Would like to validate the fix with GSC
any ideas?
Edit
This is definitely a Cloudflare issue, you can recreate by navigating to
( You have to manually copy and paste url as CF transforms it )
Those URLs are invalid because % in URLs indicates an encoded character which is followed by two hexadecimal characters (0-9, A-F), so / would be %2F, and a literal % would be %25.
%% isn’t valid, so it really is a Bad Request.
I’d guess that you either have some bad internal links somewhere that are producing these URLs or it may be that Googlebot is too smart for its own good once again and tries to guess additional URLs by adding strings it found in Javascript to the current URL (look for {%defails%} in your source).
As for fixing it: you probably don’t want Google to index those URLs because they shouldn’t contain valid content (given that they’re not valid URLs), so maybe it’s best to use a rule in robots.txt to disallow those in general and Google won’t try to index them (but they may mention them in the “URLs not indexed” list, so I tend to look for what causes Google to “find” these URLs in the first place).
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