Absolute urls
-
I am redesigning my website with an updated theme.
One of the theme plugins takes my url: https://example-site.com/1st-level-page/2nd-level-page/page-contentand changes it to https%3A%2F%2Fexample-site.com%21st-level-page%22nd-level-page/page-content%2F
Does this effect how a web crawler see's my internal links?
Can this have a negative effect on my SEO?
Should I edit the plugin to force it to render the url exactly as written? -
HI Joe. Yes. Links still work flawlessly. And if you view page source, they look perfect.
Here's a button I just made in the theme.
http://starttheme2.wpengine.com/url-encoding/
If you hover over it you can see the url is perfect. But the url it's coded in the page like this:
https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fabout%2Fteam%2Fbritney-muller
I'm not sure what plugin is causing this. If you want to have a look you most certainly are welcome to.
https://starttheme2.wpengine.com/wp-admin/UN: demo
PW: St#rtTh#m#2018 -
Hello Patrick
- Do the links still work?
- What Plugin are you using & why does it encode the URLs?
-
So after researching this, I'm being told that this is called url encoding. So the question really is, does URL encoding negatively effect internal linking and crawlers and can it negatively effect SEO?
-
No. It only displays the extra code in the word press text editor. The browser displays it properly.
Something is converting the "/" to %. There are no spaces in the url.
As I mentioned in my previous response, if I "view source" in the browser window the internal urls are all correct so I am at a loss.
Appreciate your help.
-
Yikes! Does it display that way in the browser? Is it possible to show how it looks in a browser?
The % shows when there are spaces in the domain name. You definitely don't want that URL structure - it's bad news.
-
Hi John!
Thanks for the feedback. Greatly appreciated.
Screenshot attached.
When I "view source" on a webpage in browser, the url is displayed exactly as needed. Does that matter? Or is that entirely different from the crawlers?
-
Hey Pat,
Any chance you can put the URL's in a word doc and pop a screen shot into the thread? I'm seeing % in the URL and I'm not sure if it's actually putting that in there.
If it's changing your URL structure, you'll need to do 301 redirects (one to one) in order to preserve the SEO equity. If you can edit the plugin to keep the old URL structure, that would be preferred.
Thanks!
John
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
-
Should my URLs with or without a slash? And how to avoid multiple redirects?
Moz, I am noticing that I need to go back and update my outbound links to your site. There are a lot of them because your content is so great and we love you guys. Could you explain your logic for making the change? Example on my Schema Markup Website Audits page: https://moz.com/blog/state-of-searcher-behavior-revealed/ redirected to: https://moz.com/blog/state-of-searcher-behavior-revealed
Link Building | | jessential0 -
Shortened URLs Passing Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I was going through a competitor's backlinks, and I noticed they had a number of links from ow.ly and bit.ly that according to Open Site Explorer were passing link equity with PA in the 40 and DA in the 90s. How does that happen? And, how can I duplicate that? I thought those services just shortened your URLs for Twitter feeds mostly, and Twitter no-followed everything. Thanks for any assistance you can provide! Ruben
Link Building | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Same Page, Multiple URLS- Canonical tag? Redirect?
I just read this article about how google views multiple versions of the same page as different pages of duplicate content. My website, www.telikin.com currently has many versions of the home page. There is: www.telikin.com
Link Building | | Telikin
www.telikin.com/index
www.telikin.com/index.php
www.telikin.com/index.php/ All of these seem to be their own URLS, If i use the open site explorer tool to search for links pointing to these URLS, the www.telikin.com domain shows about 700 links, and the www.telikin.com/index.php shows about 63 links. My questions: Is my SEO suffering as a result of having these different pages? Does google realize that links pointing to www.telikin.com/index.php should count towards the seo of the www.telikin.com page? If this is hurting my company's website, how do I solve this problem? I am not versed as a webmaster, so I don't understand what the best course of action would be. Should I request that our webmaster somehow redirects all traffic from the other URLS to the main www.telikin.com URL? Should I be using canonical tags on all important pages? If i do, for example, use a canonical tag on the www.telikin.com page, will Google then know to send all link juice from the www.telikin.com/index.php page to the www.telikin.com page? We also have a Joomla blog that seems to duplicate pages many times over, but that is a problem that I will have to address another time. Any comments/suggestions are more than welcome. Thanks, Dave0 -
Best SEO Friendly URL
Hi. Currently I'm using the following url: mysite.com/this-is-the-news-title/news-1234 The news title followed by the directory and the news id. Same goes to mysite.com/my-name/user-123 I think its better for SEO since the relevant words (news title and name) are to the left of the link. But some people are saying that this is not good for SEO because crawlers can't "organize" the urls in directories. So they say its better to use: mysite.com/news/this-is-the-news-title/1234 mysite.com/user/my-name/123 Cause then the crawler know what is a news and what is a user. What do you guys think? Thanks.
Link Building | | rapchan0 -
Creating new url structure for inbound links
In an effort to make is easier for our clients to link to content on our site we intend on creating a simpler url structure for them: site.com/1234 will 301 to site.com/xyz/abc/1234-this-is-where-we-want-you Is there a danger of creating new 301's just for this purpose, the goal here is to make it easier for clients to link to content and thus garner more inbound links.
Link Building | | antiquesearcher0 -
Canonicals Url question
I manage a computer repair company website, www.callnerds.com One of our main marketing strategies are blog articles and press releases to newspappers. Because of this, we have a subfolder for the author of the newspaper articles who is becoming well known, and we wanted a place for people to connect with her personally. on this site callnerds.com/andrea We only publish articles that Andrea writes. Then on the blog we publish all of the articles, including articles that andrea writes, in addition to articles written by everyone else on our staff. i would like suggestions on wether a canonical link on the /andrea site should be used. the canonical link wold point to our blog. Her site is starting to get high quality links from newspapers and magazines, however all of the content on the site is duplicate content of the same article on our blog. Any thoughts?
Link Building | | NerdsOnCall0 -
URL in signature of discussion forum post
I used to see URL's in the signature part of discussion forum posts covering various topics but it does not seem popular anymore. It seems like a good way to build links and I am wondering why it is not used. Suppose I ask a question about proper tooth brushing technique on the forum at "toothbrushingforum.com" and user "ToothBrushWizard" is nice enough to answer my question. I used to see signatures like this: Good luck,
Link Building | | superTallDan
ToothBrushWizard
www.ToothBrushWizard.com Is this considered poor taste or are these links discounted by the search engines? Is it best to keep an updated profile with your URL and hope that forum users click through to it?0 -
Linkbuilding URL Problem
Hi, I work for Perfectly Engraved. A lot of our links point to http://www.perfectlyengraved.co.uk/. However that address forwards to - http://www.perfectlyengraved.co.uk/ecommerce/scripts/default.htm. Should we ensure our links point to http://www.perfectlyengraved.co.uk/ecommerce/scripts/default.htm or does it not make difference? I've put our forwarding code below. <%@ Language=VBScript %> <% Option explicit Response.Buffer = true Response.Redirect "http://www.perfectlyengraved.co.uk/ecommerce/scripts/default.htm" %> Also, would it help if we did a 301 redirect from http://perfectlyengraved.co.uk/ecommerce/scripts/default.htm to http://www.perfectlyengraved.co.uk/ecommerce/scripts/default.htm? As both addresses for every page on our site return the page with or without www Thanks
Link Building | | Aardvark0