Google QuickSearch Referrals to Malformed URLS - Not sure what's going on, but losing traffic because of it.

I get some traffic to what are almost valid URLs on my site, but they'll have encoding issues.

For example, instead of this:

https://www.cruisehabit.com/holland-america-line-nieuw-statendam-live-blog-%E2%80%93-day-5-grand-caymansea-day

(unencoded: https://www.cruisehabit.com/holland-america-line-nieuw-statendam-live-blog-–-day-5-grand-caymansea-day)

the hit will come here:

https://www.cruisehabit.com/holland-america-line-nieuw-statendam-live-blog-%C3%83%C2%A2%C3%82%E2%82%AC%C3%82%E2%80%9C-day-5-grand-caymansea-day

(unencoded: https://www.cruisehabit.com/holland-america-line-nieuw-statendam-live-blog-–-day-5-grand-caymansea-day)

You can see that Google is, in some cases, using improper URL encoding - or otherwise malforming encoded characters in URLs.

This is what looks like in my server logs (IP masking is mine).

52.162.xxx.xxx - - [24/Jul/2020:18:38:48 -0500] "GET /holland-america-line-nieuw-statendam-live-blog-%C3%83%C2%A2%C3%82%E2%82%AC%C3%82%E2%80%9C-day-5-grand-caymansea-day HTTP/1.1" 404 19335 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0; Trident/5.0)" www.cruisehabit.com 162.215.xxx.xxx 

I don't see in my metadata, my structured data, nor my sitemap, where the URLs are improperly encoded like that. In other words, I'm pretty damn sure this isn't originating from me - but at the same time, the idea that for months (this has been going on for a while) Google has been doing this and it's not something I am finding when searching, seems hard to swallow.

Anyone seen anything like this?

submitted by /u/monorailmedic
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/hxczsl/google_quicksearch_referrals_to_malformed_urls/>