Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Use of the tilde in URLs
-
I just signed up for SEOMoz and sent my site through the first crawl. I use the tilde in my rewritten URLs. This threw my entire site into the Notice section 301 (permanent redirect) since each page redirects to the exact URL with the ~, not the %7e.
I find conflicting information on the web - you can use the tilde in more recent coding guidelines where you couldn't in the old.
It would be a huge thing to change every page in my site to use an underscore instead of a tilde int he URL. If Google is like SEOMoz and is 301 redirecting every page on the site, then I'll do it, but is it just an SEOMoz thing?
I ran my site through Firebug and and all my pages show the 200 response header, not the 301 redirect.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
-
Thanks for all the advice! I realized that Google doesn't care about the tilde -- or at least is not doing the same redirect as SEOMoz. Recently one of my older sitemaps was flagged by Google with errors because too many of the files were redirecting. All of my sitemaps would be flagged if pages were redirecting on a wide scale.
My pages generally rank in the top 5 in Google and maybe losing the tilde would get me to #1, so I'll keep it in mind for the future. Thanks again for the help.
-
We use tildes pretty heavily on our new site. They seem to be okay with Google. However I did not want to use them because some foreign keyboards do not include the character... like Mexico.
So... do folks in Mexico type in our URLs by hand? Probably not common... but it is a potential problem. It is missing from other keyboards as well.
We use the tilde because we think it helps break up words we do not want to be seen as "together" in a string. All my product URLs have the product name, separated by dashes, then we use the tilde then comes the product number. We think it may help Google see the product title as a complete string and not include the product number. Not sure if it works or not.
-
Tildes are okay these days, but 'unsafe'.
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/rfc/2396/full.html#2.3
Tilde was (begrudgingly) added to the unreserved character list a while ago, so Google should treat them fine without encoding.
However, if you can avoid using them I would, so leave the old addresses but from now on I'd use a hyphen (in preference to an underscore, still) instead of a tilde if you can.
-
Hi,
Since this is really about the way that the tool works, the quickest and most accurate way of getting the correct answer would be to email help@seomoz.org.
That being said, avoiding special characters would be our company's preferred option. This thread from Google Webmaster Central would be worth a read.
Sha
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
404 Crawl Diagnostics with void(0) appended to URL
Hello I am getting loads of 404 reported in my Crawl report, all appended with void(0) at the end. For example: http://lfs.org.uk/films-and-filmmakers/watch-our-films/1289/void(0)
Moz Pro | | moshen
The site is running on Drupal 7, Has anyone come across this before? Kind Regards Moshe | http://lfs.org.uk/films-and-filmmakers/watch-our-films/1289/void(0) |0 -
Block Moz (or any other robot) from crawling pages with specific URLs
Hello! Moz reports that my site has around 380 duplicate page content. Most of them come from dynamic generated URLs that have some specific parameters. I have sorted this out for Google in webmaster tools (the new Google Search Console) by blocking the pages with these parameters. However, Moz is still reporting the same amount of duplicate content pages and, to stop it, I know I must use robots.txt. The trick is that, I don't want to block every page, but just the pages with specific parameters. I want to do this because among these 380 pages there are some other pages with no parameters (or different parameters) that I need to take care of. Basically, I need to clean this list to be able to use the feature properly in the future. I have read through Moz forums and found a few topics related to this, but there is no clear answer on how to block only pages with specific URLs. Therefore, I have done my research and come up with these lines for robots.txt: User-agent: dotbot
Moz Pro | | Blacktie
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 My questions: 1. Are the above lines correct and would block Moz (dotbot and rogerbot) from crawling only pages that have numberOfStars=0 parameter in their URLs, leaving other pages intact? 2. Do I need to have an empty line between the two groups? (I mean between "Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0" and "User-agent: rogerbot")? (or does it even matter?) I think this would help many people as there is no clear answer on how to block crawling only pages with specific URLs. Moreover, this should be valid for any robot out there. Thank you for your help!0 -
Items listed based on size - Use "inches" or " " "
I sell Decorative nutcrackers of various sizes. At this time, I use the term "inches". I was looking at my competitor the other day, and when I did a search on his site, using the term inches did not provide me with a result. I was forced to use ex. "10" nutcracker" instead of "10 inch nutcracker". Is there a preferable usage for seo purposes. Thanks! my site: http://www.nutcrackerballetgifts.com/category/5/10-Inch-Nutcrackers.html his ite: http://www.kurtadler.com/Search?search=10"+nutcracker
Moz Pro | | NutcrackerBalletGifts0 -
Canonical URLs all show trailing slash on main site pages - using Yoast SEO for Wordpress - how to correct
We are using Yoast for a number of our sites. We use naked domain as the canonical. I have noticed in the header tags that all our sites show the canonical URLs as having a trailing slash: Example: http;//foxspizzajc.com, when I look at the source code, it shows the canonical as http;//foxspizzajc.com/ Of course, it is much more likely that all sites that link to us will not use the trailing slash - so preferably we do not want that to be the canonical - among other reasons. Does this need to be fixed so the trailing slash is removed? I cannot see how to do this in Yoast SEO or in Permalinks structure for Wordpress. Sorry for my ignorance. Thanks for any help.
Moz Pro | | Adam_RushHour_Marketing1 -
Special Characters in URL & Google Search Engine (Index & Crawl)
G'd everyone, I need help with understanding how special characters impact SEO. Eg. é , ë ô in words Does anyone have good insights or reference material regarding the treatment of Special Characters by Google Search Engine? how Page Title / Meta Desc with Special Chars are being index & Crawl Best Practices when it comes to URLs - uses of Unicode, HTML entity references - when are where? any disadvantage using special characters Does special characters in URL have any impact on SEO performance & User search, experience. Thanks heaps, Amy
Moz Pro | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Crawlers crawl weird long urls
I did a crawl start for the first time and i get many errors, but the weird fact is that the crawler tracks duplicate long, not existing urls. For example (to be clear): there is a page: www.website.com/dogs/dog.html but then it is continuing crawling:
Moz Pro | | r.nijkamp
www.website.com/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html what can I do about this? Screaming Frog gave me the same issue, so I know it's something with my website0 -
In alt tag of a image can we use #hashtag or domain.com ? Is that good SEO or not allowed ?
Some of the Google Search shows a title has a hashtag of an article, which contain keyword and while tweeting them, the title which has a hashtag automatically very good used for getting traffic to the blog. And other one, can we use the hash tag inside the alt attribute ? Or our domain name with .com in it. Like Google.com or #Google ?
Moz Pro | | Esaky0 -
Does anyone know what the %5C at the end of a URL is?
I've just had a look at the crawl diagnostics and my site comes up with duplicate page content and duplicate titles. I noticed that the url all has %5C at the end which I've never seen before. Does anybody know what that means?
Moz Pro | | Greg800