Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Brackets in a URL String

    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.

    Brackets in a URL String

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    3
    5
    3465
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • AU-SEO
      AU-SEO last edited by

      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?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • AU-SEO
        AU-SEO @Dan-Petrovic last edited by

        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

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • gfiorelli1
          gfiorelli1 @Dan-Petrovic last edited by

          Sorry... maybe I've just seen too many naive question in a too short frame of time 🙂

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Dan-Petrovic
            Dan-Petrovic @gfiorelli1 last edited by

            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.

            gfiorelli1 AU-SEO 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 3
            • gfiorelli1
              gfiorelli1 last edited by

              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?

              Dan-Petrovic 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
              • 1 / 1
              • First post
                Last post

              Got a burning SEO question?

              Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


              Start my free trial


              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.

              • See all categories

              Related Questions

              • Jackson21

                Changing Url Removes Backlink

                Hello MOZ Community, I have question regarding Bad Backlink Removal. My Site's Post's Image got 4 to 5k backlinks from unknown sites and also their is no contact details on their site so that i can contact them to remove. So, I have an idea for which i want suggestion " If I change the url that receieves backlinks" does this will remove backlinks? For Example: https://example.com/test/ got 5k backlinks if I change this url to https://examplee.com/test-failed/ does this will remove those 5k backlinks? If not then How Can I remove those Backlinks? I Know about disavow but this takes time.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jackson21
                0
              • Davit1985

                My url disappeared from Google but Search Console shows indexed. This url has been indexed for more than a year. Please help!

                Super weird problem that I can't solve for last 5 hours. One of my urls: https://www.dcacar.com/lax-car-service.html Has been indexed for more than a year and also has an AMP version, few hours ago I realized that it had disappeared from serps. We were ranking on page 1 for several key terms. When I perform a search "site:dcacar.com " the url is no where to be found  on all 5 pages. But when I check my Google Console it shows as indexed I requested to index again but nothing changed. All other 50 or so urls are not effected at all, this is the only url that has gone missing can someone solve this mystery for me please. Thanks a lot in advance.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Davit1985
                0
              • Searchout

                SEO effect of URL with subfolder versus parameters?

                I'll make this quick and simple.  Let's say you have a business located in several cities.  You've built individual pages for each city (linked to from a master list of your locations). For SEO purposes is it better to have the URL be a subfolder, or a parameter off of the home page URL: https://www.mysite.com/dallas  which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/dallas/index.php or http://www.mysite.com/?city=dallas  which is essentially https://www.mysite.com/index.php?city=dallas

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Searchout
                0
              • Gabriele_Layoutweb

                If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?

                If I block a URL via the robots.txt - how long will it take for Google to stop indexing that URL?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb
                0
              • Jonathan.Smith

                Should I include URLs that are 301'd or only include 200 status URLs in my sitemap.xml?

                I'm not sure if I should be including old URLs (content) that are being redirected (301) to new URLs (content) in my sitemap.xml. Does anyone know if it is best to include or leave out 301ed URLs in a xml sitemap?

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jonathan.Smith
                0
              • Atlanta-SMO

                Does Google Read URL's if they include a # tag? Re: SEO Value of Clean Url's

                An ECWID rep stated in regards to an inquiry about how the ECWID url's are not customizable, that "an important thing is that it doesn't matter what these URLs look like, because search engines don't read anything after that # in URLs. " Example http://www.runningboards4less.com/general-motors#!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 Basically all of this: #!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 That is a snippet out of a conversation where ECWID said that dirty urls don't matter beyond a hashtag... Is that true? I haven't found any rule that Google or other search engines (Google is really the most important) don't index, read, or place value on the part of the url after a # tag.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atlanta-SMO
                0
              • mirabile

                Brackets vs Encoded URLs: The "Same" in Google's eyes, or dup content?

                Hello, This is the first time I've asked a question here, but I would really appreciate the advice of the community - thank you, thank you!  Scenario:  Internal linking is pointing to two different versions of a URL, one with brackets [] and the other version with the brackets encoded as %5B%5D Version 1: http://www.site.com/test?hello**[]=all&howdy[]=all&ciao[]=all
                Version 2: http://www.site.com/test?hello
                %5B%5D**=all&howdy**%5B%5D**=all&ciao**%5B%5D**=all Question: Will search engines view these as duplicate content?  Technically there is a difference in characters, but it's only because one version encodes the brackets, and the other does not (See: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.asp) We are asking the developer to encode ALL URLs because this seems cleaner but they are telling us that Google will see zero difference.   We aren't sure if this is true, since engines can get so _hung up on even one single difference in character.  _ We don't want to unnecessarily fracture the internal link structure of the site, so again - any feedback is welcome, thank you. 🙂

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile
                0
              • pano

                Removing dashes in our URLs?

                Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.

                Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pano
                0

              Get started with Moz Pro!

              Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

              Start my free trial
              Products
              • Moz Pro
              • Moz Local
              • Moz API
              • Moz Data
              • STAT
              • Product Updates
              Moz Solutions
              • SMB Solutions
              • Agency Solutions
              • Enterprise Solutions
              Free SEO Tools
              • Domain Authority Checker
              • Link Explorer
              • Keyword Explorer
              • Competitive Research
              • Brand Authority Checker
              • Local Citation Checker
              • MozBar Extension
              • MozCast
              Resources
              • Blog
              • SEO Learning Center
              • Help Hub
              • Beginner's Guide to SEO
              • How-to Guides
              • Moz Academy
              • API Docs
              About Moz
              • About
              • Team
              • Careers
              • Contact
              Why Moz
              • Case Studies
              • Testimonials
              Get Involved
              • Become an Affiliate
              • MozCon
              • Webinars
              • Practical Marketer Series
              • MozPod
              Connect with us

              Contact the Help team

              Join our newsletter

              Access all your tools in one place. Whether you're tracking progress or analyzing data, everything you need is at your fingertips.

              Moz logo
              © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
              • Accessibility
              • Terms of Use
              • Privacy

              Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.