Missing Group information in GET...

User 531474 Photo


Registered User
150 posts

There are 48 of these in the "In Sitemaps" errors section and 49 in Soft 404s which I don't have any clue what that is either. When I click any of the links it gives me that error message at the top about Missing group info...etc.

Are the links correct in your sitemap file?


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Senior Advisor
10,951 posts

that was a good call there Jefff, looks like all the links in my site map have that & in them, so why aren't they "all" showing up as errors then? The more I find, the more confusing it gets lol. I will open a ticket now and find out what's what so I know if these links are supposed to be like that or what. I wouldn't think so in the sitemap.html page and I would think the links should all be exactly like they are in the website. I'll let ya know what I find out. :)
User 2641572 Photo


Registered User
1,245 posts

Tom wrote:
Why bother the developers and delay the release of the Pro version?

What developers ?? :)

Jo Ann, put Xampp or similar on your system, so you can do all your testing offline in a controlled environment. That way if you mess around with things, you won't screw your sites up.

If you put the search term 'missing group information in GET request' into Google, it only comes up with this forum link. :rolleyes: Try putting part of the actual error message into Google's search box, if it still comes up with nothing, then the error is unique to yourself.... :cool:
User 38401 Photo


Senior Advisor
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I am pretty sure it lies with Sitemapper in some way, the links in the xml file there don't seem correct to me with the amp;amp; in them, so I'll wait on the ticket I just put in for some assistance from the team. I've been trying to get wampserver to work, but I gave up on it a couple days ago, I just don't know what I'm doing wrong on it, so I'll let ya know what I find out on this when I hear back.

Might still be unique to me, but we'll at least find out why :)
User 117361 Photo


Ambassador
6,076 posts

Ampersands (&'s) in URLs

Another common error occurs when including a URL which contains an ampersand ("&"):

<!-- This is invalid! --> <a href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&section=2&copy=3&lang=en">...</a>

This example generates an error for "unknown entity section" because the "&" is assumed to begin an entity reference. Browsers often recover safely from this kind of error, but real problems do occur in some cases. In this example, many browsers correctly convert &copy=3 to ©=3, which may cause the link to fail. Since &lang; is the HTML entity for the left-pointing angle bracket, some browsers also convert &lang=en to ?=en. And one old browser even finds the entity &sect;, converting &section=2 to §ion=2.

To avoid problems with both validators and browsers, always use &amp; in place of & when writing URLs in HTML:

<a href="foo.cgi?chapter=1&amp;section=2&amp;copy=3&amp;lang=en">...</a>

Note that replacing & with &amp; is only done when writing the URL in HTML, where "&" is a special character (along with "<" and ">"). When writing the same URL in a plain text email message or in the location bar of your browser, you would use "&" and not "&amp;". With HTML, the browser translates "&amp;" to "&" so the Web server would only see "&" and not "&amp;" in the query string of the request.


http://htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/problems.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/525001/parsing-a-url-from-xml-with-amp-in-it

I have to admit JoAnn that it took a couple of coffees for me to realise that you weren't actually posting something about the shopping cart, but rather about the sitemapper. I found these couple of references for you, but it is more likely the very bottom link which is of interest to those "who-know-how" which counts me out straight away!
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I'll have a look at the links more tomorrow when I get up. Originally I posted it here because I thought it was something to do with the SCC program since the error spoke about the cart. Since then I am pretty sure it's the site mapper program, I'll move it to the Sitemapper section tomorrow when I get up if someone hasn't already. Thanks for the links :)
User 2068004 Photo


Guest
14 posts

It is definitely a tribble infection! Just kidding of course.

I have looked in to your issue and it does appear that the XML file is what is throwing off the spider. The thing is that the XML file while technically is an XML file it is not a true XML Standards file (there is no schema for the code) these files are used strictly by our software and are not meant to be parsed in any other way than by the Shopping Cart.

You can avoid this problem with Google and other search engines by adjusting your robots.txt file to tell the bots to ignore the files. That is the only way that you can avoid the messages from the search engines.
Jon Wilson
Support Specialist
CoffeeCup Software Inc.
An Internet 500 Company
User 38401 Photo


Senior Advisor
10,951 posts

I answered your ticket response Jon, and am hoping there's more to this than what you were originally thinking since I don't "think" we can tell the robot not to spider the sitemap.xml file since that's the whole purpose of it right?

**Moving this post to Sitemapper section, sorry for the confusion all as it was originally my thought that it was SCC causing the issue. Thoughts have changed since then :) **
User 289442 Photo


Registered User
161 posts

Jo Ann, I thought that Jon was speaking of the SCC xml file/s. And of course you can tell the robots to not pay attention to them, but if Jon was actually speaking of the Sitemapper xml file, then I totally agree with you and some clarification is surely needed.
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Senior Advisor
10,951 posts

Yeah TomH, he was confusing the mess with the post being originally about SCC and ending up being Sitemapper like a few others did, no worries though, they are checking it out and seeing what might be wrong. Thanks all for your feedback on this :)

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