Hi Caroline

I don't think there are any fundamental issues with the structure for SEO. Many large corporates will have an "umbrella"  corporate "group" website with links to their subsidiary sites.

The critical factor for SEO as with any website and its pages is the relevancy of its content based on the many ranking factors discussed in this article: http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors

Peter

Hi Mirabile,

This is a difficult one. My understanding would be to use the hexadecimal encoding of potentially unsafe characters (of which a square bracket would be) in a URL (i.e. %5b instead of [ ), but I think assuming the URLs are the same, then it makes no difference.

But that said, whilst Google might read the URLs as the same, that's not to say another search engine will do that as well. And then, what about how a browser might interpret a URL encoded differently but being effectively the same?

Probably, the main danger is that the search engine or the browser won't be able to follow the link with unsafe characters in at all.

I'm not sure that is the full answer you were looking for, but maybe someone with more expertise will be able to shed more light on this for you.

I hope my answer helps at least in part.

Peter