A2A_LINKURL link problems

I am experiencing the same thing, I’ve got over 2,000 of the same crawl errors on Google for a blog that I am webmaster for and I have also removed the AddToAny plugin. The errors keep coming even though the plugin has been removed.

If you come up with a solution, I would be very grateful if you could share with me so I can resolve this on my sites as well.

Thank you!

I’ve not seen many new posts on this. Prior to the recent updates I had fixed the problem by modifying the .htaccess file, but now the issue has returned…for the life of me I can’t remember what I had changed that appears have been have changed back in the updates..

It was an entry into the WP .htaccess file though or it could have been the plugin’s file.

Expert help would be much appreciated.
Cheers!

I couldn’t find any solutions to the root problem myself and just resorted to sticking a couple of redirects into my web config.

for nginx:

rewrite ^/A2A_LINKURL / permanent;
rewrite ^/([^/]+)/A2A_LINKURL /$1 permanent;

for Apache (don’t quote me on these!):

RewriteRule ^/A2A_LINKURL / [R=301,L];
RewriteRule ^/([^/]+)/A2A_LINKURL /$1 [R=301,L];

You may or may not need the “L” last rule.

BTW, has anyone tried re-adding the plugin to see if that might clear things up?

HTH!

I’d forgotten about this issue but here is what I experienced;
I did try uninstall/reinstall and it did not change the issues. So I deactivated the plugin which worked until I upgraded to WP 3.0.4, then I started having the problem again (still with a deactivated plugin). So I deleted the pluging.

As some point I had done something to the .htaccess file that was recommended from a forum, but I couldn’t remeber what it was (?).
I may try it again with your solution to see if it works.

Regards,

Update:

My rewrite rule for the general case works, but only when the “A2A_LINKURL” shows up 1 level deep. For example:
/foo/A2A_LINKURL

However, it doesn’t work if it’s more than 1 level deep. Ex:
/foo/bar/A2A_LINKURL or /foo/bar/blah/A2A_LINKURL, etc.

So far this rewrite rule seem to fix that:
rewrite ^/(.*)/A2A_LINKURL /$1 permanent;

Cheers!

This is very annoying, I’ve deactivated and removed it and still the number of 404’s grows. The plug in hasn’t been maintained for a while so not much hope there, this is how I fixed it.

Go and get the “redirection” plug in from urbangiraffe then add the following as a permanent redirect to bounce all the 404’s to your front page

source URL: (.*)/A2A_LINKURL
target URL: your home page or wherever you want

Thanks Gordon for pointing me to this thread. (BTW, AddToAny is *very* actively maintained!)

The good news is that this is not an issue caused by the AddToAny plugin. The bad news is that the issue is larger, may be harder to troubleshoot, and will continue to be a problem until you fix it.

The issue stems from invalid code from either your theme or other plugins, which causes another plugin’s code (like AddToAny’s) to bleed into your other code, causing Google’s crawler to follow malformed links improperly (interesting that it’s only Google).

Specifically the issue is caused by one of two things:
– Invalid HTML code output (from a theme or another plugin)
– Invalid JavaScript code in AddToAny’s Additional Options box (which is blank by default)

To fix:
– Ensure that your front page validates – use the W3C HTML Validator and uninstall any plugins that output invalid code (AddToAny outputs 100% W3C valid code FYI), and change themes if your theme is severely invalid
– Empty the Additional Options box in WP Settings > Share/Save Buttons and Save Changes (the Reset button would work too if you don’t mind losing your AddToAny settings)

Since Google’s crawler is likely to keep trying those 404 URLs for a while, you may need to wait a few weeks for the reports to calm down after the two steps above.

The AddToAny plugin is completely fine to activate in the meantime. Most importantly, you should resolve any major issues with invalid HTML code caused by your theme, other plugins, or invalid JavaScript code in AddToAny’s Additional Options box.