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.
Will properly encoded & signs hurt or help me?
-
Hello friends,
Will properly encoding a url hurt my ranking after having it improperly coded? I want to change my & symbols to &
If I go from:
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=coolTo:
http://www.example.com/product.php?attachment=pins&model=coolWill I get hurt if I make the leap?
-
Properly encoding a URL will not hurt your ranking. In fact, it is a good practice to properly encode URLs because it can help ensure that they are properly interpreted by web browsers and other systems.
The & symbol is used to separate parameters in a URL. When a URL is not properly encoded, the & symbol can be interpreted as the start of a new parameter, which can cause the URL to be incorrectly interpreted. By encoding the & symbol as &, you can ensure that the URL is properly interpreted and that all of the parameters are correctly associated with the correct values.
There is no risk of being penalized or otherwise negatively impacted in terms of search rankings by properly encoding a URL. It is simply good practice to ensure that your URLs are properly formatted and can be correctly interpreted by the systems that use them.
-
Thanks! I dodged a bullet. I was going to change all my urls with an & to & the other day, but I decided to ask here first. I'm glad I did. These are very old urls too, maybe 15 years old. I'll just let it be, they rank great.
-
Changing URLs in any way will hurt your rankings - the process of redirecting the old URL to the new one causes a loss of equity which then has to gradually be rebuilt.
That said, for new URLs, I would say the only relevant consideration is how the URL will appear in search results and browsers as readable, or not, to human users.
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
-
Will Google crawl and rank our ReactJS website content?
We have 250+ products dynamically inserted and sorted on our site daily (more specifically our homepage... yes, it's a long page). Our dev team would like to explore rendering the page server-side using ReactJS. We currently use a CDN to cache all the content, which of course we would like to continue using. SO... will Google be able to crawl that content? We've read some articles with different ideas (including prerendering): http://andrewhfarmer.com/react-seo/
Technical SEO | | Jane.com
http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-big-day-at-google/ If we were to only load the schema important to the page (like product title, image, price, description, etc.) from the server and then let the client render the remaining content (comments, suggested products, etc.), would that go against best practices? It seems like that might be seen as showing the googlebot 1 version and showing the site visitor a different (more complete) version.0 -
Will removing the trailing slash impact my SEO?
Hi there, We have a company website based on Wordpress. I just noticed that under Settings > Permalinks I can configure the look of the URLs and even remove the trailing slash. We have about 2-300 pages online. If I remove the trailing slash now, will that negatively impact our SEO in anyway for existing pages? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Amr-Haffar0 -
Best & easiest way to 301 redirect on IIS
Hi all, What is the best and easiest way to 301 redirect URLs on IIS server? I got access to the FTP and WordPress back office, but no access to the server admin. Is there an easy way to create 301 redirect without having to always annoy the tech in charge of the server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | 2MSens0 -
Headers & Footers Count As Duplicate Content
I've read a lot of information about duplicate content across web pages and was interested in finding out about how that affected the header and footer of a website. A lot of my pages have a good amount of content, but there are some shorter articles on my website. Since my website has a header, footer, and sidebar that are static, could that hurt my ranking? My only concern is that sometimes there's more content in the header/footer/sidebar than the article itself since I have an extensive amount of navigation. Is there a way to define to Google what the header and footer is so that they don't consider it to be duplicate content?
Technical SEO | | CyberAlien0 -
Can too many pages hurt crawling and ranking?
Hi, I work for local yellow pages in Belgium, over the last months we introduced a succesfull technique to boost SEO traffic: we have created over 150k of new pages, all targeting specific keywords and all containing unique content, a site architecture to enable google to find these pages through crawling, xml sitemaps, .... All signs (traffic, indexation of xml sitemaps, rankings, ...) are positive. So far so good. We are able to quickly build more unique pages, and I wonder how google will react to this type of "large scale operation": can it hurt crawling and ranking if google notices big volumes of content (unique content)? Please advice
Technical SEO | | TruvoDirectories0 -
My site keeps losing positions, Please help!!
Hello, This is the first time I post on this forum but have been a Pro Member for about 11 months. Im going crazy the more I do the more it drop positions. My problem is that one of the sites that Im working is has not been on the top 50 of any of the keywords. There were many issues but I have reduce the number. Im not sure if I can post the link here or via PM. My market is very competitive and Im using word press. One of my target keywords is: web design miami I would like for a member to give me an opinion of my site and may tell me what Im doing wrong. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | ogdcorp0 -
Genesis WP Theme H1 Tag not properly Used?
I am in the process of redesigning my website, and I have been working on the Genesis framework a lot lately, so I used the Genesis framework to make my new site. The URL is http://protechig.com As I look at the H1 on the page (homepage only, every other page has solid h1s from an SEO perspective.) The first thing that I see is that the home page H1 is a links (to protech's home page). The second thing that I see is the the title text is replaced with an image (my logo) and there is a text-indent:-99999; and overflow:hiden; I just want to know from an SEO perspective if this is okay, and, if it isn't, what I could/should to to rectify it. Thanks Zach
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
I need help with a PHP canonical URL tags
I found a little difficult for me to do a canonical tag in my PHP. On-Page Report Card We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. I don't know how to tidy my PHP Any suggestion.
Technical SEO | | lnietob0
