Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • SEO Q&A
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. Moz Tools
    3. Moz Pro
    4. Special Characters in URL & Google Search Engine (Index & Crawl)

    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)

    Moz Pro
    2
    2
    4452
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • LabeliumUSA
      LabeliumUSA last edited by

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • JaneCopland
        JaneCopland last edited by

        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.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • 1 / 1
        • First post
          Last post

        Got a burning SEO question?

        Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


        Start my free trial


        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.

        • See all categories

        Related Questions

        • ssblawton2533

          Unsolved Ooops. Our crawlers are unable to access that URL

          moz pro error

          hello
          i have enter my site faroush.com but i got an error
          Ooops. Our crawlers are unable to access that URL - please check to make sure it is correct
          what is problem ?

          Moz Pro | | ssblawton2533
          0
        • Easigrass

          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 | | Easigrass
          1
        • threecounties

          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 | | threecounties
          0
        • ayrutd

          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 | | ayrutd
          1
        • Cart_generation

          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_generation
          1
        • thlonius

          Should I block .ashx files from being indexed ?

          I got a crawl issue that 82% of site pages have missing title tags
          All this pages are ashx files (4400 pages). 
          Should I better removed all this files from google ?

          Moz Pro | | thlonius
          0
        • JohnW-UK

          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-UK
          0
        • nsauser

          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 | | nsauser
          0

        Get started with Moz Pro!

        Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

        Start my free trial
        Products
        • Moz Pro
        • Moz Local
        • Moz API
        • Moz Data
        • STAT
        • Product Updates
        Moz Solutions
        • SMB Solutions
        • Agency Solutions
        • Enterprise Solutions
        Free SEO Tools
        • Domain Authority Checker
        • Link Explorer
        • Keyword Explorer
        • Competitive Research
        • Brand Authority Checker
        • Local Citation Checker
        • MozBar Extension
        • MozCast
        Resources
        • Blog
        • SEO Learning Center
        • Help Hub
        • Beginner's Guide to SEO
        • How-to Guides
        • Moz Academy
        • API Docs
        About Moz
        • About
        • Team
        • Careers
        • Contact
        Why Moz
        • Case Studies
        • Testimonials
        Get Involved
        • Become an Affiliate
        • MozCon
        • Webinars
        • Practical Marketer Series
        • MozPod
        Connect with us

        Contact the Help team

        Join our newsletter
        Moz logo
        © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
        • Accessibility
        • Terms of Use
        • Privacy

        Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.