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
-
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?
-
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
-
Sorry... maybe I've just seen too many naive question in a too short frame of time
-
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.
-
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?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
410 or 301 after URL update?
Hi there, A site i'm working on atm has a thousand "not found" errors on google console (of course, I'm sure there are thousands more it's not showing us!). The issue is a lot of them seem to come from a URL change. Damage has been done, the URLs have been changed and I can't stop that... but as you can imagine, i'm keen to fix as many as humanly possible. I don't want to go mad with 301s - but for external links in, this seems like the best solution? On the other hand, Google is reading internal links that simply aren't there anymore. Is it better to hunt down the new page and 301-it anyway? OR should I 410 and grit my teeth while google crawls and recrawls it, warning me that this page really doesn't exist? Essentially I guess I'm asking, how many 301s are too many and will affect our DA? And what's the best solution for dealing with mass 404 errors - many of which aren't attached or linked to from any other pages anymore? Thanks for any insights 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
URL in russian
Hi everyone, I am doing an audit of a site that currently have a lot of 500 errors due to the russian langage. Basically, all the url's look that way for every page in russian: http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/food-packaging-machines/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexrbrg
http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/wood-flour-solutions/
http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/cellulose-solutions/ I am wondering if this error is really caused by the server or if Google have difficulty reading the russian langage in URL's. Is it better to have the URL's only in english ?0 -
Link juice through URL parameters
Hi guys, hope you had a fantastic bank holiday weekend. Quick question re URL parameters, I understand that links which pass through an affiliate URL parameter aren't taken into consideration when passing link juice through one site to another. However, when a link contains a tracking URL parameter (let's say gclid=), does link juice get passed through? We have a number of external links pointing to our main site, however, they are linking directly to a unique tracking parameter. I'm just curious to know about this. Thanks, Brett
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Brett-S0 -
Duplicate URLs ending with #!
Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Code to change country in URL for locale results
How do I change the code in my URL to search in Google by specific location?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
Htaccess Redirect with %C2%A0 in URL
Below is my setup for redirects in .htaccess file in my root word press installation. The www to non-www works well, so no problems there Other page redirects work well, too (example: redirect 301 /some-page/ http://mysite.com/another-page/ (I didn't post those because I have a few too many : ) So here it goes... RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pepsimoz
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.mysite.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://mysite.com/$1 [R=301,L] BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress redirect 301 /archives/10-college- majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%20majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ I'm having a problem with the last 301 redirect: redirect 301 /archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-majors/ not working... As you can see I've tried using other varations of the "space" but no go. I also used a redirect in cPanel's Redirect screen; testing all the possible options + wildcard I've also tried this: http://serverfault.com/questions/201829/using-special-characters-in-apache-mod-rewrite-rule (perhaps unsuccessfully, because it caused a 500 server error and it's a different situation in my case) I also saw something here: http://www.webmasterworld.com/apache/3908682.htm but I don't know if it works and how I would implement that + do so without compromising ALL other redirects. Note: the URL displays with a space in the address bar of all major web browsers: http://mysite.com/10-college- majors/ and goes to a 404 page I have a goregous page / PR6 / high authority site linking to the URL on my site, but they copied the URL with a space somehow. I contacted the person responsible for the website and he claims it works fine (aka he didn't check it). Is there a clean way to redirect ONLY this problematic URL without compromising other redirects, etc? Any ideas would be great. I'll respond with progress. Thanks in advance. UPDATE the redirect works, and it did work. Even so, when looking at source of page linking to mine, the URL looks like this: ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college- majors/ Clicking the URL in Source View in FireFox takes me to ``` http://mysite.com/archives/10-college-%C2%A0majors/ none of my 301 redirects should direct there. I don't have any redirect plugins either.0