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.
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
-
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 -
Increase in Rankings, but search visibility is decreasing
I just started updating my site with the very basics, focus keyword, meta description, and page titles. I see that I am going up in my targeted keywords, however my search visibility has dropped from 3.34% to 2.78%. My assumption is that my keyword choice is a little off, however I see that I have increased in keyword rankings and dropped very little in what I was ranking for previously, plus the keyword volume seems relatively the same. In fact I've added far more keywords than I have dropped. Curious why my search visibility has dropped, however my keyword rankings only seem to increase.
Moz Pro | | kthomasd0 -
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 -
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 -
Why is MOZ and Google search Volume so different?
A search term in MOZ shows the monthly search volume to be 49K. In Google, the same term shows the search volume at only 1300 monthly searches. Which do I trust? Thanks, Don
Moz Pro | | rcman0 -
Need help understanding search filter URL's and meta tags
Good afternoon Mozzers, One of our clients is a real estate agent and on that site there is a search field that will allow a person to search by filtered categories. Currently, the URL structure makes a new URL for each filter option and in my Moz reports I get the report that there is missing meta data. However, the page is the same the filter options are different so I am at a loss as to how to proper tag our site to optimize those URL's. Can I rel canonical the URL's or alt rel them? I have been looking for a solution for a few days now and like I said I am at a loss of how to properly resolve these warning messages, or if I should even be concerned with the warning messages from Moz (obviously I should be concerned, they are warning messages for a reason). Thank you for your assistance in advance!
Moz Pro | | Highline_Ideas0 -
Moz & Xenu Link Sleuth unable to crawl a website (403 error)
It could be that I am missing something really obvious however we are getting the following error when we try to use the Moz tool on a client website. (I have read through a few posts on 403 errors but none that appear to be the same problem as this) Moz Result Title 403 : Error Meta Description 403 Forbidden Meta Robots_Not present/empty_ Meta Refresh_Not present/empty_ Xenu Link Sleuth Result Broken links, ordered by link: error code: 403 (forbidden request), linked from page(s): Thanks in advance!
Moz Pro | | ZaddleMarketing0 -
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