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 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
-
Domain still not being found in search
Hi guys, I've been handed a client who needs some seo work. I've tweaked one of their pages to focus on a chosen keywords about 4 months back but still the site is not even visible using the new Domain Analysis tool from moz and it still won't rank at all for the keywords. Am I missing something here? Is there something blocking the SERP from listing the website? I've ran a site: search on Google and it returns 283 results on the website. It's puzzling me as there clearly is something stopping it from being ranked. The domain name in question is: https://cloud9inecommunications.co.uk Thanks in advance.
Moz Pro | | Easigrass1 -
WEbsite cannot be crawled
I have received the following message from MOZ on a few of our websites now Our crawler was not able to access the robots.txt file on your site. This often occurs because of a server error from the robots.txt. Although this may have been caused by a temporary outage, we recommend making sure your robots.txt file is accessible and that your network and server are working correctly. Typically errors like this should be investigated and fixed by the site webmaster. I have spoken with our webmaster and they have advised the below: The Robots.txt file is definitely there on all pages and Google is able to crawl for these files. Moz however is having some difficulty with finding the files when there is a particular redirect in place. For example, the page currently redirects from threecounties.co.uk/ to https://www.threecounties.co.uk/ and when this happens, the Moz crawler cannot find the robots.txt on the first URL and this generates the reports you have been receiving. From what I understand, this is a flaw with the Moz software and not something that we could fix form our end. _Going forward, something we could do is remove these rewrite rules to www., but these are useful redirects and removing them would likely have SEO implications. _ Has anyone else had this issue and is there anything we can do to rectify, or should we leave as is?
Moz Pro | | threecounties0 -
Woocommerce filter urls showing in crawl results, but not indexed?
I'm getting 100's of Duplicate Content warnings for a Woocommerce store I have. The urls are
Moz Pro | | JustinMurray
etc These don't seem to be indexed in google, and the canonical is for the shop base url. These seem to be simply urls generated by Woocommerce filters. Is this simply a false alarm from Moz crawl?0 -
Should I block .ashx files from being indexed ?
I got a crawl issue that 82% of site pages have missing title tags
Moz Pro | | thlonius
All this pages are ashx files (4400 pages).
Should I better removed all this files from google ?0 -
Exporting Google and Bing Search Results
Is there away to get a spreadsheet of the pages indexed for a certain domain in google and bing? i.e. I search google for Site:www.domain.com and I want to export a .csv file of all those domains/pages. Cheers
Moz Pro | | JohnW-UK0 -
Google SERP count 100
I'm not finding a clear solution to getting 100 results in the Google SERP. I'm currently using Firefox as I use Chrome for being logged into Google (Gmail, Docs, etc.) I tried the Grease Monkey script, no luck. I tried appending the url with &num=100 (looks like that may have been killed in 2010 which may explain why the GM script isn't working). And it doesn't look like any toolbar, SEOMoz included has that functionality, any ideas or places to look? In addition, does anyone have a good SERP numbering tool? If I do a search and the first page, including Local & Organic has 15 results, when I click over to the 2nd page it starts back at #11, kind of defeats the purpose of using a numbering tool 😉 Any help would be appreciated. Thanks much!
Moz Pro | | nsauser0 -
Use of the tilde in URLs
I just signed up for SEOMoz and sent my site through the first crawl. I use the tilde in my rewritten URLs. This threw my entire site into the Notice section 301 (permanent redirect) since each page redirects to the exact URL with the ~, not the %7e. I find conflicting information on the web - you can use the tilde in more recent coding guidelines where you couldn't in the old. It would be a huge thing to change every page in my site to use an underscore instead of a tilde int he URL. If Google is like SEOMoz and is 301 redirecting every page on the site, then I'll do it, but is it just an SEOMoz thing? I ran my site through Firebug and and all my pages show the 200 response header, not the 301 redirect. Thanks for any help you can provide.
Moz Pro | | fdb0 -
Does anyone know what the %5C at the end of a URL is?
I've just had a look at the crawl diagnostics and my site comes up with duplicate page content and duplicate titles. I noticed that the url all has %5C at the end which I've never seen before. Does anybody know what that means?
Moz Pro | | Greg800