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.
Special Characters in URL & Google Search Engine (Index & Crawl)
- 
					
					
					
					
 G'd everyone, I need help with understanding how special characters impact SEO. Eg. é , ë ô in words Does anyone have good insights or reference material regarding the treatment of Special Characters by Google Search Engine? - 
how Page Title / Meta Desc with Special Chars are being index & Crawl 
- 
Best Practices when it comes to URLs - 
- 
uses of Unicode, HTML entity references - when are where? 
- 
any disadvantage using special characters 
- 
Does special characters in URL have any impact on SEO performance & User search, experience. 
 Thanks heaps, Amy 
- 
- 
					
					
					
					
 Google handles special characters in URLs, titles, etc. just fine now - a page like http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Château_de_Versailles uses the proper accent on the a, and is displayed properly in modern browsers as well as in Google's results. There should be no impact on rankings, although it's safe to say that best practice would include using the proper characters, as they certainly benefit usability. 
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
- 
		
		Moz ToolsChat with the community about the Moz tools. 
- 
		
		SEO TacticsDiscuss the SEO process with fellow marketers 
- 
		
		CommunityDiscuss industry events, jobs, and news! 
- 
		
		Digital MarketingChat about tactics outside of SEO 
- 
		
		Research & TrendsDive into research and trends in the search industry. 
- 
		
		SupportConnect on product support and feature requests. 
Related Questions
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		Difference between urls and referring urls?
 Sorry, nit new to this side of SEO We recently discovered we have over 200 critical crawler issues on our site (mainly 4xx) We exported the CSV and it shows both a URL link and a referring URL. Both lead to a 'page not found' so I have two questions? What is the difference between a URL and a referring URL? What is the best practice/how do we fix this issue? Is it one for our web developer? Appreciate the help. Moz Pro | | ayrutd1
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		URL Length Issue
 MOZ is telling me the URLs are too long. I did a little research and I found out that the length of the URLs is not really a serious problem. In fact, others recommend ignoring the situation. Even on their blog I found this explanation: "Shorter URLs are generally preferable. You do not need to take this to the extreme, and if your URL is already less than 50-60 characters, do not worry about it at all. But if you have URLs pushing 100+ characters, there's probably an opportunity to rewrite them and gain value. This is not a direct problem with Google or Bing - the search engines can process long URLs without much trouble. The issue, instead, lies with usability and user experience. Shorter URLs are easier to parse, copy and paste, share on social media, and embed, and while these may all add up to a fractional improvement in sharing or amplification, every tweet, like, share, pin, email, and link matters (either directly or, often, indirectly)." And yet, I have these questions: In this case, why do I get this error telling me that the urls are too long, and what are the best practices to get this out? Thank You Moz Pro | | Cart_generation1
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		Links to Your Site: No Data Available in Google Search Console
 The site I am working on did not have their site submitted to Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). I submitted the site and a sitemap that auto updates. Google is crawling the site daily (about 30 pages a day). Under Search Traffic > Links to Your Site it shows no data is availible. I thought it was because it was a newly submitted site, but it has been two months now. Moz seems to have the same issue. Moz does show inbound links, but their are some that we think should really help us that are not shown. For instance, the Dallas Morning News wrote this article. They have a high DA and PA. Also, iliveindallas.com has an article about us that is still on the front page. That was a few weeks ago but also does not show up on Moz or Google SC. We are trying to be selective about the links we are getting. That they are follow links from reputable sites. Worried that both Google and Moz are not showing them. Moz Pro | | TapGoods1
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		404 Crawl Diagnostics with void(0) appended to URL
 Hello I am getting loads of 404 reported in my Crawl report, all appended with void(0) at the end. For example: http://lfs.org.uk/films-and-filmmakers/watch-our-films/1289/void(0) Moz Pro | | moshen
 The site is running on Drupal 7, Has anyone come across this before? Kind Regards Moshe | http://lfs.org.uk/films-and-filmmakers/watch-our-films/1289/void(0) |0
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		Block Moz (or any other robot) from crawling pages with specific URLs
 Hello! Moz reports that my site has around 380 duplicate page content. Most of them come from dynamic generated URLs that have some specific parameters. I have sorted this out for Google in webmaster tools (the new Google Search Console) by blocking the pages with these parameters. However, Moz is still reporting the same amount of duplicate content pages and, to stop it, I know I must use robots.txt. The trick is that, I don't want to block every page, but just the pages with specific parameters. I want to do this because among these 380 pages there are some other pages with no parameters (or different parameters) that I need to take care of. Basically, I need to clean this list to be able to use the feature properly in the future. I have read through Moz forums and found a few topics related to this, but there is no clear answer on how to block only pages with specific URLs. Therefore, I have done my research and come up with these lines for robots.txt: User-agent: dotbot Moz Pro | | Blacktie
 Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 User-agent: rogerbot
 Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0 My questions: 1. Are the above lines correct and would block Moz (dotbot and rogerbot) from crawling only pages that have numberOfStars=0 parameter in their URLs, leaving other pages intact? 2. Do I need to have an empty line between the two groups? (I mean between "Disallow: /*numberOfStars=0" and "User-agent: rogerbot")? (or does it even matter?) I think this would help many people as there is no clear answer on how to block crawling only pages with specific URLs. Moreover, this should be valid for any robot out there. Thank you for your help!0
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		Crawlers crawl weird long urls
 I did a crawl start for the first time and i get many errors, but the weird fact is that the crawler tracks duplicate long, not existing urls. For example (to be clear): there is a page: www.website.com/dogs/dog.html but then it is continuing crawling: Moz Pro | | r.nijkamp
 www.website.com/dogs/dog.html
 www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dog.html
 www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
 www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html
 www.website.com/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dogs/dog.html what can I do about this? Screaming Frog gave me the same issue, so I know it's something with my website0
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		How to force SeoMoz to re-crawl my website?
 Hi, I have done a lot of changes on my website to comply with SeoMoz advices, now I would like to see if I have better feedback from the tool, how can I force it to re-crawl a specific campaign? (waiting another week is too long :-)) Moz Pro | | oumma0
- 
		
		
		
		
		
		Best Practices for having Social Profiles indexed
 There has been a lot of talk lately around social profiles potentially improving your brand as well as search. What I'd like to know is the best practices for getting those social profiles crawled and indexed so they actually provide a good link to my site. I'm also wondering what the difference between what Linkscape sees and what Google sees and when I'm looking at Open Site Explorer's rankings on one of those social profiles how can I be sure that Google sees it the same way. I ask this because a lot of these profiles are not well internally linked to. An example is about.me, it's a potentially great link, but it's essentially an island, and even after dropping a couple Twitter links to my profile, Open Site Explorer shows and Page Authority of 1, and it's not even indexed with Google. What I did last night was put a link to my about.me, flickr and wedding wire in my Connect menu drop down on my site to get that crawled hopefully soon. Are there other methods of getting those crawled and indexed so it starts passing some juice? Moz Pro | | WilliamBay
 What do you guys do?0
 
			
		 
			
		 
					
				 
					
				 
					
				 
					
				 
					
				 
					
				 
					
				