Brackets in a URL String
-
Was talking with a friend about this the other day.
Do Brackets and or Braces in a URL string impact SEO? (I know short human readable etc... but for the sake of conversation has anyone relaised any impacts of these particular Characters in a URL?
-
Thanks for the feedback.
I personally don't think any SEO Question is Naive, there are so many permutations and possibilities. And if you work with a large company and Large Dev Teams with Legacy Systems you are often put in scenarios that little questions like this are important and can dictate how entire scope may or may not be realised. I am compiling a comprehensive URL guidelines for my Devs (which I will certainly share with the SEOmoz community when complete.)
A little sideline note: Someone once told me Pipe Characters "|" won't impact a URL string. However, they actually frequently break, get truncated or double encoded when being crawled from Google/Bing with little rhyme or reason.
The question about Brackets/Braces Stemmed from this link from Coke. http://www.cokeunleashed.com.au/wagsallowance.jsp?mkwid={ifsearch:s}{ifcontent:c}WVnyieg7&pcrid=13521527730
-
Sorry... maybe I've just seen too many naive question in a too short frame of time
-
Yes agree there are other more pressing issues to debate but I don't think this question is out of place. I welcome people to post any type of SEO question here no matter how silly they think it might be. We're all on different stages of learning, but more than once I have been inspired by a naive question to look up something which lead to a discovery of immense value and interest to me and others in the SEO community.
Brackets from what I can see do not represent a significant element, in theory they can act as a separator of different logical units of a URL (though there are much better ways to do that such as using hyphens). I would personally not use them and not sure if they represent a problem in way crawlers interpret URL structure.
-
No... they are just awful.
Anyway... sorry to cite myself and link to a post I wrote... http://www.iloveseo.net/the-ten-crappiest-mythical-seo-questions-we-should-not-ask-anymore/
Without offence, but is it not better thinking to more relevant SEO problems?
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
-
Mystery URLs showing in Analytics - All 404s
Hi Guys So we have a whole load of mystery urls showing in analytics .The urls are completely not relevant and have somehow been created However - when you click on the URLs - they all go to 404 pages - pages not found. The website is a travel website but is showing pages like /overcome-fatigue-during-mesothelioma-treatment/ in analytics. Webmaster is not showing any of these pages - but analytics is showing traffic for them??? My initial thought was that it was a spam URL injection - but they are not pages. They don't exist Our database is fine, WP admin seems fine - none of these supposed pages have been created on WP - so why are they showing on analytics as having driven traffic??? None of the urls are indexed on Google. Its a mystery!!!! Can anyone help? Has anyone seen this before????
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
Keyword in URL - SEO impact
Hi, We don't have most important keyword of our industry in our domain or sub-domain. How important it is to have keyword in website URL? Most of our competitors pages with "keyword" urls been listing in SERP. What is back-links role in this scenarion? And which URL have more advantage? keyword in sub-domain or page with keyword. Like for "seo" keyword..... seo.example.com or example.com/seo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Urls in Bilingual websites
1-I have a bilingual website. Suppose that I am targeting a page for keyword "book" and I have included it in that page url for the English version: English version: www.abc.com/book Can I use the translation of "book" in the second language of the website url instead of "book" ? Please let me know which of the following urls are right " French Verison: www.abc.com/fr/book or www.abc.com/fr/livre livre=Book in French 2- Does Google have any tool to check if the second language page of the website has exactly the same content as the English version. What I want to do is for example for a certain page in English version, my targeted keyword is "book" . So my content would be around books. But in the French version of this page, I want to focus on keyword "Pencil" in French instead of "book". Is it wrong or any consequences? That was the main reason for the question number one. Because if it is ok to do what I explained in item 2 then I will set my urls like: In English : www.abc.com/book In French: www.abc.com/fr/crayon crayon=Pencil in French
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlirezaHamidian0 -
Page URL keywords
Hello everybody, I've read that it's important to put your keywords at the front of your page title, meta tag etc, but my question is about the page url. Say my target keywords are exotic, soap, natural, and organic. Will placing the keywords further behind the URL address affect the SEO ranking? If that's the case what's the first n number of words Google considers? For example, www.splendidshop.com/gift-set-organic-soap vs www.splendidshop.com/organic-soap-gift-set Will the first be any less effective than the second one simply because the keywords are placed behind?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ReferralCandy0 -
Code to change country in URL for locale results
How do I change the code in my URL to search in Google by specific location?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Will our PA be retained after URL updates?
Our web hosting company recently applied a seo update to our site to deal with canonicalization issues and also rewrote all urls to lower case. As a result our PA is now 1 on all pages its effected. I took this up with them and they had this to say. "I must confess I’m still a bit lost however can assure you our consolidation tech uses a 301 permanent redirect for transfers. This should ensure any back link equity isn’t lost. For instance this address: http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels-bath-sheets/aztex/egyptian-cotton-Bath-sheet_ct474bd182pd2731.htm Redirects to this page: http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels-bath-sheets/aztex/egyptian-cotton-bath-sheet_ct474bd182pd2731.htm And the redirect returns 301 header response – as discussed in your attached forum thread extract" Firstly, is canonicalization working as the number of duplicate pages shot up last week and also will we get our PA back? Thanks Craig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
How to get better URL description when ranking #3
OK, last question of the week. I promise. I'm doing something right. I distribute for manufacturers. For some of my less known manufactuers I am #3 or #2 rank. For my main product the manufacturer is #1,2 with some numerical code as the discription. The manufacture will sell direct. To get the customers attention I need to PPC, and luckily it's inexpensive. Is there any way to control what the content is of the listing?. I would like to state in my #3 rank " 10-10-PP, In stock, same day shipping, best pricing." Does Google choose what to display and if so is there some where on my site I can influece this? For you experts, perhaps this is the joke of the week.? Please do not have a heart attack when laughing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Wales0 -
How to 301 redirect ASP.net URLS
I have a situation where a site that was ASP.net has been replaced with a WordPress site. I've performed a Open Site Explorer analysis and found that most of the old pages, ie www.i3bus.com/ProductCategorySummary.aspx?ProductCategoryId=63 are returning a HTTP Status = NO DATA ... when followed ends up at the 404 catch-all page. Can I code the standard 301 Redirects in the .htaccess file for these ASP URLs? If not, I'm open to suggestions.... Thanks Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marvo0
