:/0 at the End of a URL Gives 404: Cut It Off with a 301 Redirect (.htaccess and Nginx)
I noticed long ago that the characters :/0 somehow get appended to normal links to my site, producing addresses like
https://nemcd.com/2013/12/v-excel-propali-listy-kak-vklyuchit/:/0
Such a page returns a 404 error. Luckily I have the SEO Ultimate plugin installed — it’s what reported these errors. Time to fix the problem.
I didn’t dig deep into where :/0 comes from. Finding the root cause would be the proper way, but a quick search through the site’s code turned up nothing, so I decided to simply set up a redirect.
The fix: a 301 redirect to the normal address
We cut off the unwanted suffix and make a permanent (301) redirect to the correct link. This way the visitor lands on the right page, and search engines understand that the address with :/0 is the same as the one without it.
I wrote about a similar problem before — indexing of links with ?utm_source (in Russian): there Twitter was adding its own “tail” to links. The situation is different, but the solution is similar.
Apache: a rule in .htaccess
Add these lines to the site’s root .htaccess:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)\:\/0
RewriteRule ^(.*)\:\/0$ $1 [R=301,L]
For WordPress the result looks like this:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)\:\/0
RewriteRule ^(.*)\:\/0$ $1 [R=301,L]
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
Our rule must come before the WordPress rules, otherwise the request goes to index.php and the redirect won’t fire. If your .htaccess has other lines, merge them carefully.
Nginx: a rule in the site config
If the site runs on Nginx + PHP-FPM, .htaccess is ignored. Add this line to your site’s server { … } block and reload Nginx (nginx -t, then nginx -s reload):
rewrite ^(.*):/0$ $1 permanent;
Checking
Open any link ending in :/0 — the browser should go to the normal address. You can check the response code with:
URL=https://example.com/2013/12/any-page curl -I "$URL/:/0"
The response should contain 301 Moved Permanently and a Location line with the address without :/0. Be sure to check that the whole site still works as before: no new 404 errors and no infinite redirect loop.