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.
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.
-
Thanks for all the advice! I realized that Google doesn't care about the tilde -- or at least is not doing the same redirect as SEOMoz. Recently one of my older sitemaps was flagged by Google with errors because too many of the files were redirecting. All of my sitemaps would be flagged if pages were redirecting on a wide scale.
My pages generally rank in the top 5 in Google and maybe losing the tilde would get me to #1, so I'll keep it in mind for the future. Thanks again for the help.
-
We use tildes pretty heavily on our new site. They seem to be okay with Google. However I did not want to use them because some foreign keyboards do not include the character... like Mexico.
So... do folks in Mexico type in our URLs by hand? Probably not common... but it is a potential problem. It is missing from other keyboards as well.
We use the tilde because we think it helps break up words we do not want to be seen as "together" in a string. All my product URLs have the product name, separated by dashes, then we use the tilde then comes the product number. We think it may help Google see the product title as a complete string and not include the product number. Not sure if it works or not.
-
Tildes are okay these days, but 'unsafe'.
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/rfc/2396/full.html#2.3
Tilde was (begrudgingly) added to the unreserved character list a while ago, so Google should treat them fine without encoding.
However, if you can avoid using them I would, so leave the old addresses but from now on I'd use a hyphen (in preference to an underscore, still) instead of a tilde if you can.
-
Hi,
Since this is really about the way that the tool works, the quickest and most accurate way of getting the correct answer would be to email [email protected].
That being said, avoiding special characters would be our company's preferred option. This thread from Google Webmaster Central would be worth a read.
Sha
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
-
Url-delimiter vs. SEO
Hi all, Our customer is building a new homepage. Therefore, they use pages, which are generated out of a special module. Like a blog-page out of the blog-module (not only for blogs, also for lightboxes). For that, the programmer is using an url-delimiter for his url-parsing. The url-delimiter is for example a /b/ or /s/. The url would look like this: www.test.ch/de/blog/b/an-article www.test.ch/de/s/management-coaching Does the url-delimiter (/b/ or /s/ in the url) have a negative influence on SEO? Should we remove the /b/ or /s/ for a better seo-performance Thank you in advance for your feedback. Greetings. Samuel
Moz Pro | | brunoe10 -
Youtube traffic page url referral
Hello, How can I see which videos from Youtube that has my domain inserted in their description url drive traffic to my domain? I can see in GA how many visitors are coming from Youtube to my domain, but I can't see what Youtube video pages has driven traffic. Any help?
Moz Pro | | xeonet320 -
Add to cart redirect using 302
I am getting a list of crawl errors in Moz because I am using a 302 redirect when people click on an item using the quickview add to cart eg:http://copyfaxes.com/cart/quickadd?partno=4061 will redirect them to the viewshoppingcart page. Is this wrong should this be a 301 redirect? There is no link juice to pass. Thanks
Moz Pro | | copyfaxes10 -
In alt tag of a image can we use #hashtag or domain.com ? Is that good SEO or not allowed ?
Some of the Google Search shows a title has a hashtag of an article, which contain keyword and while tweeting them, the title which has a hashtag automatically very good used for getting traffic to the blog. And other one, can we use the hash tag inside the alt attribute ? Or our domain name with .com in it. Like Google.com or #Google ?
Moz Pro | | Esaky0 -
Batch lookup domain authority on list of URL's?
I found this site the describes how to use excel to batch lookup url's using seomoz api. The only problem is the seomoz api times out and returns 1 if I try dragging the formula down the cells which leaves me copying, waiting 5 seconds and copying again. This is basically as slow as manually looking up each url. Does anyone know a workaround?
Moz Pro | | SirSud1 -
Meta keywords no longer in use
Can someone point me to the official article explaining why meta keywords are no longer taken into account by search engines please? I know Moz has indicated that search engines ignore them, but I would like to read a bit more about it - what was the reason behind it and since when.
Moz Pro | | coremediadesign0 -
Is there a tool to upload multiple URLs and gather statistics and page rank?
I was wondering if there is a tool out there where you can compile a list of URL resources, upload them in a CSV and run a report to gather and index each individual page. Does anyone know of a tool that can do this or do we need to create one?
Moz Pro | | Brother220 -
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