Spaces in Blogger Labels - A Change
I just noticed today that Blogger has changed how they handle spaces in 'labels' (aka 'tags') and they've made the situation worse...
When you have spaces in your blog post title spaces are inserted to take the place of the spaces. For example:
Spaces in Blogger Labels - A Change
would turn into the file name:
spaces-in-blogger-labels-change.html
which was great because search engine spiders interpret dashes as spaces. If the same phrase were a label/tag, then it used to come out looking like:
Spaces in Blogger Labels - A Change.html
which was horrible because it contained actual spaces in the file name. Instead of fixing things properly, they've now made the situation even worse and the file names for labels now look like:
Spaces%20in%20Blogger%20Labels%20-%20A%20Change.html
While that's a properly constructed URL (if you're unlucky enough to have spaces in your URL), it's not a proper file name. In fact, it just won't work - your server will serve the old file with the spaces in it, not the new file with the %20. To get the new file you'd have to put a %2520 to indicate that you want a file that has a %20 in the file name.
How can they get this so wong??? I mean they're owned by Google - you'd think they could do better...
So, what I'm now going to go through and do (and what I suggest everyone else do), is replace every space in every label with a dash. It won't look so great at the bottom of your post, but it will work...
Tags: Blogging, Google, Web Application Development
Categories: Blogging
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:56 pm
I was searching on this exact problem. I was thinking I ouwld have to use dashes, but I really hoped there would have been a better solution. Maybe they will get it right next time.
May 7th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
likewise, I would hope that there’s a neater solution - or do I have to go through and change every label to insert dashes
Anyway, thanks for the info - at least now I know what the problem is.
One thought - why do labels with spaces in work OK on some blogs (e.g. http://www.quackometer.net/blog/) and not others, like mine (www.holfordwatch.info)?
Very odd…
May 7th, 2007 at 6:32 pm
QuackOMeter only looks like they’re working…
This is where it get tricky. The old label pages are still there on your server (Blogger doesn’t delete them), it just creates new ones with %20 in the file name (which you can only see with %2520 in the URL).
What that means is that the old ones will still be served, but won’t contain any new information. For example, on quackometer, the current first story about Home Pregnancy Gender testing has a label of ‘daily mail’. If you click on the link you see a page, but it starts with an older story when it should have the new story first. If you change the %20 in the URL to %2520 then you’ll see the new label page with the story on gender testing…
It’s not ‘weird’ at all… It makes complete sense and it amazes me that Blogger has let the problem continue…
May 7th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
thanks - now it makes sense what was going on…
May 9th, 2007 at 12:09 am
I’ve been looking for an answer to this. Now, all I need to do is delete every multi-word label and start over. Thanks Blogger!
May 9th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
I wish they’d fix this or at least let people know. I’ve got over 300 posts and dozens of multi-word tags. This sucks.