The Google web crawler has indexed a whole set of URLs with encoded slashes (%2F) for our site. I assume it has picked up the pages from our XML sitemap file. The problem is that the live pages will actually result in a failure because of the Url Encoded Slashes Problem in Apache. Some solutions are mentioned here We are implementing a 301 redirect scheme for all the error pages. This should make the Google bot delete the pages from the crawling errors (no more crashing pages). Does implementing the 301s require the pages to be "live"? In that case we may be forced to implement solution 1 in the article. The problem is that solution 1 will pose a security vulnerability..