&amp, in URL's

B

Bernhard Sturm

Jukka said:
Because unwillingness to tell what you are really doing
is so often caused by its being morally or practically questionable.

and who is telling you that the asked question is really morally or
practically questionable? See, that's exactly what I meant with second
guessing. Maybe asking first what the OP really wants to achieve could
avoid unwilligness to tell an answer, instead of bluntly blaming him
that his intentions are most obviously morally wrong ;-)
I made the experience that people who are just trolling around, and
having *questionable* intentions rarely show up for a longer discussion.
Most of the time they are dropping their questions, hoping for an answer
and then never post a reply to it...
 
P

Philip Ronan

Si said:
& in the html link will still render as & in the browser location
URI so difference would be detected in the referer logs, although it is
the aff ID that is tracked anyway.

Actually there are a few browsers out there that can't do this properly. One
of my sites sometimes gets requests for URLs containing "&" where there
should only be a "&". Here are the culprit UAs from yesterday's log:

"Test Spider 0.1"
"Mozilla/5.0 compatible Access Gateway"
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)"

The first one looks like a home-made effort, but the other two ought to know
better surely?

Fortunately the server still manages to send the right pages out despite the
incorrect URLs in the requests
 
H

hyweljenkins

Richard said:
www.validator.w3.org/

Run your links through the validator and see what happens.

"Error: & is not acceptable in the url. Instead, use &amp".

There should be no reason for any browser not to accept the &amp.
After all, it is one of the 255 defined ascii character codes.

"&" isn't an ASCII code, and there only 127 (plus null) codes.
Haven't we been here before?
 
T

T.J.

Jukka K. Korpela said:
Because unwillingness to tell what you are really doing
is so often caused by its being morally or practically questionable.

Can you tell me what part of my original post led you to
the opinion I was unwilling to tell you what I was really doing,
what is morally or questionable about wanting to know
about how affiliate links work and what is wrong with asking
what effect leaving of amp; actually has?
You just automatically jumped to the conclusion, I was trying
to exploit search engines.
 
J

Jukka K. Korpela

Bernhard Sturm said:
and who is telling you that the asked question is really morally or
practically questionable?

My sixth sense. Or sometimes logic, reason, or guess.
Maybe asking first what the OP really wants to achieve

Maybe anyone who asks for free help should give sufficient information
about the problem without being asked.

If someone wants to use links for normal linking he should not be afraid of
using correct HTML syntax. If you think you "need" to use incorrect syntax
for some external reasons, there's no point in discussing the issue before
you tell exactly what those reasons are.
 
R

Robert Morien

Jukka K. Korpela said:
My sixth sense. Or sometimes logic, reason, or guess.


Maybe anyone who asks for free help should give sufficient information
about the problem without being asked.

If someone wants to use links for normal linking he should not be afraid of
using correct HTML syntax. If you think you "need" to use incorrect syntax
for some external reasons, there's no point in discussing the issue before
you tell exactly what those reasons are.

I can tell you from experience that affiliate links are weird. I had one
that had four occurrences of & which I changed to & the link stopped
working properly. Futzed with it until I got to the point that the first
three occurrences could be changed, but the fourth always broke the
link. As getting the link to work properly was more important than
validation, I let it slide.

And I wasn't doing anything to cheat search-engines.
 
T

T.J.

Robert Morien said:
I can tell you from experience that affiliate links are weird. I had one
that had four occurrences of & which I changed to & the link stopped
working properly. Futzed with it until I got to the point that the first
three occurrences could be changed, but the fourth always broke the
link. As getting the link to work properly was more important than
validation, I let it slide.

And I wasn't doing anything to cheat search-engines.

Thanks,
I have a feeling I was in a similar situation, which is why I asked
the original question.
I had some links up for about 3 weeks and was selling 4 or 5
products a week.
I then decided to do some tidying up and validating of pages.
I changed all the affiliate links to make them comply left them for
2 or 3 weeks and had no sales, I switched them back to the original
at the start of this week and have had 3 sales since then.
Whether it is coincidence or not is worrying, as the adjusted links still
work but I don't know if I am being credited for the leads.
Like you say, having the link working and being tracked is more important
than the page validating on this occasion.
 
N

Nick Theodorakis

On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 10:02:20 +0100, Matthias Gutfeldt


[...]
... And remember, it's a newsgroup, not a cuddling group.

It was when Brucie was here ;-)

Nick
 
R

Robert Morien

T.J. said:
Thanks,
I have a feeling I was in a similar situation, which is why I asked
the original question.
I had some links up for about 3 weeks and was selling 4 or 5
products a week.
I then decided to do some tidying up and validating of pages.
I changed all the affiliate links to make them comply left them for
2 or 3 weeks and had no sales, I switched them back to the original
at the start of this week and have had 3 sales since then.
Whether it is coincidence or not is worrying, as the adjusted links still
work but I don't know if I am being credited for the leads.
Like you say, having the link working and being tracked is more important
than the page validating on this occasion.
It was easier for me. I changed the & and then pasted the url into the
browser and at the 4th & the page would no longer come up. (actually it
would but it was a generic "home" page for the affiliate program and I
build specific links to specific products.) The other thing of course is
to just click on your link and you should eventually get a hit on your
tracking page. (not terribly accurate though.)
 
D

dorayme

From: Matthias Gutfeldt <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: alt.html
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 10:02:20 +0100
Subject: Re: &amp; in URL's



Seeing how many newbies show up in here, I'd say your fear is unfounded.
And remember, it's a newsgroup, not a cuddling group.


Matthias
--
Swiss Blog Feeds:
http://www.blog.ch/
Bloggertreffen 19.03.2005 in Basel:
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/alex/Bloggertreffen_2005


lets now concentrate hard on remembering what a newsgroup is, it obviously
has some essential nature precluding any confusion with cuddling... or plain
decency...

but your point is good, Matthias, its essential nature is that it is open to
everyone with every kind of nature of their own as is constantly proved
every moment of every day on every newsgroup

it's actually surprising how good it can sometimes be. i recommend that
sensitive types just ignore the cowardly tough guys and their insults. there
are some very decent and knowledgeable people here too...

dorayme
 
D

Duende

While sitting in a puddle dorayme scribbled in the mud:
there
are some very decent and knowledgeable people here too...

Why Thank you. Most people think I'm just plane evil and dumb.
 

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