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
-
Help to decide of domain move reversal after 5 months!
Hello, first sorry for my bad english,it isn't my first lanugage.
Technical SEO | | Milad25
I have a website with 13 years of history and activity. 5 Months ago we received an warning message from our domain provider which would seize our domain because of sanctions (i live in Iran), and they have seized many of iranian domains since then, therefore i have decided to quickly change my domain to another address so i could save my website as much as possible before they take out my domain...
I have moved my website successfully to a new domain address and have done everything necessary for a good domain move (301 all links, change template and...) I have also used the "Change of Address Tool" provided in google search console so google knows my new domain address and change all of my links...
Unfortunately 90% of my traffics comes from google, therefore we are hevaily depending on organic traffic.
Since i have changed my domain address my traffic has been declining, and now i have only 30% of the traffic input left from google compared to my old domain 5 months ago. (i had recently some SEO troubles too which could effect this decline even more)
Fortunately my old domain wasn't seized by the domain provider and i have successfully transfered it to another provide recently so there is no danger for my old domain anymore.
My question is, should i move my website back to my old domain (cancel the google "Change of Address Tool" and use it again to move the new domain back to the old domain)? My old domain has more than 13 Years of history,has many backlinks within this 13years, and till now, i cannot get good rankings with new posts on the new domain, sometimes google even does not index my new articles several days, but my old domain ranks still well (i have tested a new article on the old domain to see how it performs and it was not very good, but i think it ranks still better than my new domain).
My top pages and categories has been redirected successful and are still ranking well on google on the new domain address and hasn't been affected negativly, my main problem are new posts that are not ranking well o even does not get indexed for several days!
I don't know what to do now, are 5months not enough for google to completly transfer all domain scores from my old domain to the new one? Will all scores of my old domain even transfer to my old domain eventually? How about the many Backlinks i have pointed to the old domain? (which 90% i cannot change or ask to change to my new address) Will the backlinks scores pointing to the old domain transfer to the new domain?In other hand i fear to move my site back to the old domain because i don't know how google would behave, would all my seo score and rankings come back after i move back to the old domain? Also as far as i know, after 6months of using the google "Change of Address Tool" i cannot cancle the domain change anymore, therefore i have roughly 1 month to decide to cancle the move or not...
Please if anyone could help or guide me what to do it would be life saving for me, because my whole income and my family depends on my website... 😞0 -
Help with Getting Googlebot to See Google Charts
We received a message from Google saying we have an extremely high number of URLs that are linking to pages with similar or duplicate content. The main difference between these pages are the Google charts we use. It looks like Google isn't able to see these charts (most of the text are very similar) and the charts (lots of it) are the main differences between these pages. So my question is what is the best approach to allowing Google to see the data that exists in these charts? I read from here http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/69818/how-can-i-get-google-to-index-content-that-is-written-into-the-page-with-javascr that a solution would be to have the text that is displayed on the charts coded into the html and hidden by CSS. I'm not sure but it seems like a bad idea to have it seen by Google but hidden to the user by CSS. It just sounds like a cloaking hack. Can someone clarify if this is even a solution or is there a better solution?
Technical SEO | | ERICompensationAnalytics1 -
I need help compiling solid documentation and data (if possible) that having tons of orphaned pages is bad for SEO - Can you help?
I spent an hour this afternoon trying to convince my CEO that having thousands of orphaned pages is bad for SEO. His argument was "If they aren't indexed, then I don't see how it can be a problem." Despite my best efforts to convince him that thousands of them ARE indexed, he simply said "Unless you can prove it's bad and prove what benefit the site would get out of cleaning them up, I don't see it as a priority." So, I am turning to all you brilliant folks here in Q & A and asking for help...and some words of encouragement would be nice today too 🙂 Dana
Technical SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Parallax Scrolling & SEO
Does anyone know the impact of Parallax scrolling from a SEO prospective?
Technical SEO | | AlgoFreaks0 -
Subdomains & CDNs
I've set up a CDN to speed up my domain. I've set up a CNAME to map the subdomain cdn.example.com to the URL where the CDN hosts my static content (images, CSS and JS files, and PDFs). www.example.com and cdn.example.com are now two different IP addresses. Internal links to my PDF files (white papers and articles) used to be www.example.com/downloads but now they are cdn.example.com/downloads The same PDF files can be accessed at both the www and the cdn. subdomain. Thus, external links to the www version will continue to work. Question 1: Should I set up 301 redirects in .htaccess such as: Redirect permanent /downloads/filename.pdf http://cdn.example.com/downloads/filename.pdf Question 2: Do I need to do anything else in my .htaccess file (or anywhere else) to ensure that any SEO benefit provided by the PDF files remains associated with my domain? Question 3: Am I better off keeping my PDF files on the www side and off of the CDN? Thanks, Akira
Technical SEO | | ahirai0 -
301 Redirect & Linking Root Domain Count
Howdy Mozzers! If I do a 301 redirect from a domain that say has 200 linking root domains, to a fresh domain will the fresh domain now (when updated) have a linking root domain count of 200? Also, is it beneficial or detrimental to do a 301 redirect for an unrelated website i.e. garden hose website, to a children's playgorund equipment website in order to capture the link juice? Best
Technical SEO | | clickfactory0 -
Well, I need some help, advice, something.
Hey all, I'm new to the SEOmoz thing but I like it so far. I think I have my site listing so messed up that it's effecting my rank. I have 3 domains. 1.) rt112media.com 2.) route112media.com 3.) route112.net. Each domain was purchased through GoDaddy.com and still remain there. I have my own hosting account which I was registered as rt112media.com with route112media.com and route112.net listed as add on domains. Technically, I would like for my main site to be route112media.com for everything. However when I registered the site as rt112media.com I didn't know the issues I would have as far as different domains so I registered with rt112media.com as my main domain name. Anyways, as of now I have rt112media.com as my main domain through my cpanel hosting.I have both domains route112media.com and route112.net set for 301 wildcard redirects to rt112media.com on my hosting account and my GoDaddy account. When I started my WMT account I didn't really know which domain to use cause I figured I could link them all to one. So, I signed up as routet12media.com. After a little while I realized it was not recieving anything because everything was being redirected to rt112media.com Anyways both addresses have been crawled and indexed so they are showing as two. So, I requested to change the route112media.com address to rt112media.com in WMT. That was about 2 weeks ago and it is still pending request. I'm not having further problems with WMT because of the www.rt112media.com vs http://rt112media.com. I am the verified owner of both but I can not switch the www.rt112media account to show the non www. account as the main one because I have the other pending. My site is still being crawled as 2 versions rt112media.com and route112media.com. So what is my best option? And what would be the worst cause scenario if I wanted to start completely over using route112media.com as my main domain with hosting and all. Sorry this was so long I just wanted to explain my situation. I'm lost. Any advice would be appreciated! http:/rt112media.com
Technical SEO | | Route112Media0 -
Need Help With Robots.txt on Magento eCommerce Site
Hello, I am having difficulty getting my robots.txt file to be configured properly. I am getting error emails from Google products stating they can't view our products because they are being blocked, and this past week, in my SEO dashboard, the URL's receiving search traffic dropped by almost 40%. Is there anyone that can offer assistance on a good template robots.txt file I can use for a Magento eCommerce website? The one I am currently using was found at this site here: e-commercewebdesign.co.uk/blog/magento-seo/magento-robots-txt-seo.php - However, I am getting problems from Google now because of it. I searched and found this thread here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/multi-store_set_up/multiple_website_setup_with_different_document_roots#the_root_folder_robots.txt_file - But I felt like maybe I should get some additional help on properly configuring a robots for a Magento site. Thanks in advance for any help. Please, let me know if you need more info to provide assistance.
Technical SEO | | JerDoggMckoy0