Will properly encoded & signs hurt or help me?
-
Hello friends,
Will properly encoding a url hurt my ranking after having it improperly coded? I want to change my & symbols to &
If I go from:
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=coolTo:
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=coolWill I get hurt if I make the leap?
-
Properly encoding a URL will not hurt your ranking. In fact, it is a good practice to properly encode URLs because it can help ensure that they are properly interpreted by web browsers and other systems.
The & symbol is used to separate parameters in a URL. When a URL is not properly encoded, the & symbol can be interpreted as the start of a new parameter, which can cause the URL to be incorrectly interpreted. By encoding the & symbol as &, you can ensure that the URL is properly interpreted and that all of the parameters are correctly associated with the correct values.
There is no risk of being penalized or otherwise negatively impacted in terms of search rankings by properly encoding a URL. It is simply good practice to ensure that your URLs are properly formatted and can be correctly interpreted by the systems that use them.
-
Thanks! I dodged a bullet. I was going to change all my urls with an & to & the other day, but I decided to ask here first. I'm glad I did. These are very old urls too, maybe 15 years old. I'll just let it be, they rank great.
-
Changing URLs in any way will hurt your rankings - the process of redirecting the old URL to the new one causes a loss of equity which then has to gradually be rebuilt.
That said, for new URLs, I would say the only relevant consideration is how the URL will appear in search results and browsers as readable, or not, to human users.
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
-
Link Spam from Competitor Help
A clients link profile is recently getting lots of spam links related to "abortion pills" and "does my husband cheat" I found a few of the sites that link, and it appears that there is some malicious code on the site injecting links at the top of the site. http://www.med-reporter.at/index.asp?men=Gesundheit&submen=Produkte&artid=1587&kategorie=&blockzl=3 Can anyone look at the link above and tell me what network or software is creating these links?
Technical SEO | | webbroi0 -
Google how deal with licensed content when this placed on vendor & client's website too. Will Google penalize the client's site for this ?
One of my client bought licensed content from top vendor of Health Industry. This same content is on the vendor's website & my client's site also but on my site there is a link back to vendor is placed which clearly tells to anyone that this is a licensed content & we bought from this vendor. My client bought paid top quality content for best source of industry but at this same this is placed on vendor's website also. Will Google penalize my client's website for this ? Niche is HEALTH
Technical SEO | | sourabhrana1 -
Changing menus regularly - will this impact SEO
We are working on an internal project, where the website owner is thinking of making regular changes to one or two items on the top level menu. Assuming they redirect the original pages or navigate to them in other ways, is there any other impact on SEO to changing the menu structure? I assume they'd submit new sitemaps after each change. Many thanks Fiona
Technical SEO | | fionah0 -
Duplicate website with http & https
I have a website that only in a specific state in the USA we had to add a certificate for it to appear with https. my question is how to prevent from the website to be penalized on duplicate content with the http version on that specific state. please advise. thanks!
Technical SEO | | taly0 -
Magento CMS Block Issue --- Help Please
Good Morning, We have a Magento shopping cart based site running on RedHat version of Linux. We had a CMS block created for the homepage of http://goo.gl/JgK1e designed to be visible only on the homepage only and nowhere else. We copied the entire site structure onto a new URL http://goo.gl/XUH3f . (this one running on CentOS) and have an odd situation on our hands... Even though the CMS block “static_after_footer_block” is “enabled”, it either completely disappears (moments later), or whenever it does display, it is visible in ALL levels of the site (not just the homepage it was designed for) Other than this anomaly, the site seems to be operating correctly… Anyone out there with some insight? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
User Created Subdomain Help
Have I searched FAQ: Yes My issue is unique because of the way our website works and I hope that someone can provide some guidance on this.Our website http://breezi.com is a website builder where users can build their own website. When users build their site it creates a sub-domain route to their created site, for example: http://mike.breezi.com. Now that I have explained how our site works here is the problem: Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools are indexing ALL the user created websites under our TLD and thus it is our impression that any content created in those sub-domains can confuse the search engine to thinking that the user created website and content is relevant to _OUR _main sitehttp://breezi.com. So, what we would like to know if there is a way to let search engines know that the user created sites and content is not related to our TLD site. Thanks for any help and advise.
Technical SEO | | breezi0 -
Help needed with robots.txt regarding wordpress!
Here is my robots.txt from google webmaster tools. These are the pages that are being blocked and I am not sure which of these to get rid of in order to unblock blog posts from being searched. http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?cat=743 http://ensoplastics.com/theblog/?p=240 These category pages and blog posts are blocked so do I delete the /? ...I am new to SEO and web development so I am not sure why the developer of this robots.txt file would block pages and posts in wordpress. It seems to me like that is the reason why someone has a blog so it can be searched and get more exposure for SEO purposes. IS there a reason I should block any pages contained in wodrpress? Sitemap: http://www.ensobottles.com/blog/sitemap.xml User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*/trackback Disallow: /*/feed Disallow: /*/comments Disallow: /? Disallow: /*? Disallow: /page/
Technical SEO | | ENSO
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Disallow: /wp-content/themes/ Disallow: /trackback Disallow: /commentsDisallow: /feed0 -
Help with steps to take when fixing cannonical url structure?
I would like to 301 redirect all the variations of my site to a single url but would like some clarification on some issues. I have always been confused about how to handle cannonicalization and hopefully this can clear it up for me and others. This particular site is about 1 year old and gets approximately 15k uniques a month in a great niche. I want to make sure I do this correctly as to not hurt my existing rankings which are quite good. Here is is what I am unsure about. Basically I should pick the best url structure to redirect all the others to correct? What determines what url is best to redirect all the rest to? is it www.domain.com, http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com? Is the best one to redirect to always standard and something I should set up at the beginning of my site? Or is picking the best url to redirect to based on what url starts to rank in google and you then use that one? Should I be going through each of my rankings and seeing what url is ranking in google for each page? On this particular site ALL of my urls in google have no www. or http but instead show up in the SE as domain.com or domain.com/inner-page/html. In that case what do I do? I know the slow way to do redirects. I use my hostgator account and do it in cpanel and do it one by one. Is there a faster way where I can go and make lots of changes at once? Maybe I can choose all the variations and put in the one I want them all to redirect to? After I figure the above out is fixing all of this as simple as redirecting ALL variations to the one I will use moving forward for each page on my site? Then I am done? Thanks again for the help! Jake
Technical SEO | | PEnterprises0