Special characters in URL
-
Will registered trademark symbol within a URL be bad? I know some special characters are unsafe (#, >, etc.) but can not find anything that mentions registered trademark.
Thanks!
-
Jen - I agree with Eli. It's best not to use the TM symbol in a URL string - it will confuse the end user when it's URL encoded and scrambled. Rather, put the mark on your pages and in images.
If you have gone through the registration process with the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), you should be using the symbol next to your mark, and not the TM symbol.
According to the Trademark FAQs on the USPTO site: http://www.uspto.gov/faq/trademarks.jsp#_Toc275426682
Do federal regulations govern the use of the designations "TM" or "SM" or the symbol?
If you claim rights to use a mark, you may use the "TM" (trademark) or "SM" (service mark) designation to alert the public to your claim of a “common-law” mark. No registration is necessary to use a "TM" or "SM" symbol and you may continue to use these symbols even if the USPTO refuses to register your mark. Those symbols put people on notice that you claim rights in the mark, although common law doesn't give you all the rights and benefits of federal registration.
You may only use the federal registration symbol "" after the USPTO actually registers a mark, not while an application is pending. And it may only be used on or in connection with the goods/services listed in the federal trademark registration and while the registration is still alive (you may not continue to use it if you don’t maintain the registration or it expires). Although there are no specific requirements on where the symbol should be placed relative to the mark, most businesses use the symbol in the upper right corner of the mark. Note: Because several foreign countries use “” to indicate that a mark is registered in that country, use of the symbol by the holder of a foreign registration may be proper.
From another section_: There are no specific requirements on where the “” symbol should be placed relative to the mark, but most businesses use the symbol in the upper right corner of the mark._
Hope this helps!
-- Jeff -
Jen,
I'm not sure if it will be bad based on research, but based on what you aim for in a URL (clarity, what the article is about, user experience, descriptive keywords, etc...) the TM Registered may not fit well.
Plus, be careful, your TM (if using symbols) will get changed to () or () in the URL - making it less user friendly to type in (let alone look at)..
Hope this Helps!
Eli Overbey
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
-
URL is invalid: Why?
Hello everyone, I am currently listing my company on business directories. For some websites however when I add my website URL, it comes up as URL is invalid. What could be the reason for this? I have tried different variations like www., http:// and https://. Kind Regards,
Technical SEO | | SMCCoachHire
Aqib0 -
URL Mixed Cases and Duplicate Content
Hi There, I have a question for you. I am working on a website where by typing any letter of the URL in lower or upper case, it will give a 200 code. Examples www.examples.com/page1/product www.examples.com/paGe1/Product www.examples.com/PagE1/prOdUcT www.examples.com/pAge1/proODUCt and so on… Although I cannot find evidence of backlinks pointing to my page with mixed cases, shall I redirect or rel=canonical all the possible combination of the cases to a lower version of them in order to prevent duplicate content? And if so, do you have any advice on how to complete such a massive job? Thanks a lot
Technical SEO | | Midleton0 -
URL Structure for Deal Aggregator
I have a website that aggregates deals from various daily deals site. I originally had all the deals on one page /deals, however I thought that maybe it might be more useful to have several pages e.g. /beautydeals or /hoteldeals. However if I give every section it's own page that means I have either no current deals on the main /deals page or I will have duplicate content. I'm wondering what might be the best approach here? A few of the options that come to mind are: 1. Return to having all the deals on one page /deals and linking internally to content within that page
Technical SEO | | andywozhere
2. Have both a main /deals page with all of the deals plus other pages such as /beautydeals, but add re="canonical" to point to the main /deals page
3. Create new content for the /deals page... however I think people will probably want to see at least some deals straight away, rather than having to click through to another page.
4. Display some sub-categories on the main /deals page, but have separate URLs for other more popular sub-categories e.g. /beautydeals (this is how it works at the moment) I should probably point out that the site also has other content such as events and a directory. Any suggestions on how best to approach this much appreciated! Cheers, Andy0 -
Omitting URLs from XML Sitemap - Bad??
Hi all, We are working on an extremely large retail site with some major duplicate content issues that we are in the process of remedying. The site also does not currently have an XML sitemap. Would it be advisable to create a small XML sitemap with only the main category pages for the time being, and then after our duplicate content issues are resolved, uploading the complete sitemap? Or should we wait to upload anything until all work is complete down to the product page level and canonicals are in place? Will uploading a incomplete sitemap be fraudulent or misleading in the eyes of the search engines and prompt a penalty, or would having at least the main pages mapped while we continue work be okay? Please let me know if more info is needed to answer! Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | seo320 -
Can you 404 any forms of URL?
Hi seomozzers, <colgroup><col width="548"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F256%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F258%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F242%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F257%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F260%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F225%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F251%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F176%23comment-form | These are duplicate content and the canonical version is: http://www.ex.com/user (login and pass page of the website) Since there were multiple other duplicates which mostly have been resolved by 301s, I figured that all "LOGIN" URLs (above) should be 404d since they don't carry any authority and 301 those wouldn't be the best solution since "too many 301s" can slow down the website speed. But a member of the dev team said: "Looks like all the urls requested to '404 redirect' are actually the same page http://ex.com/user/login. The only part of the url that changes is the variables after the "?" . I don't think you can (or highly not recommended) make 404 pages display for variables in a url. " So my question is: I am not sure what he means by that? and Is it really better to not 404 these? Thanks0 -
URL rewriting causing problems
Hi I am having problems with my URL rewriting to create seo friendly / user friendly URL's. I hope you follow me as I try to explain what is happening... Since the creation of my rewrite rule I am getting lots of errors in my SEOMOZ report and Google WMT reports due to duplicate content, titles, description etc For example for a product detail, it takes the page and instead of a URL parameter it creates a user friendly url of mydomain.com/games-playstation-vita-psp/B0054QAS However in the google index there is also the following friendly URL which is the same page - which I would like to remove domain.com/games-playstation-vita/B0054QAS The key to the rewrite on the above URLs is the /B0054QAS appended at the end - this tells the script which product to load, the details preceeding this could be in effect rubbish i.e. domain.com/a-load-of-rubbish/B0054QAS and it would still bring back the same page as above. What is the best way of resolving the duplicate URLs that are currently in the google index which is causing problems The same issue is causing a quite serious a 5XX error on one of the generated URLs http://www.mydomain.com/retailersname/1 - , if I click on the link the link does work - it takes you to the retailers site, but again it is the number appended at the end that is the key - the retailersname is just there for user friendly search reasons How can I block this or remove it from the results? Hope you are still with me and can shed some light on these issues please. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | ocelot0 -
Duplicate content error from url generated
We are getting a duplicate content error, with "online form/" being returned numerous times. Upon inspecting the code, we are calling an input form via jQuery which is initially called by something like this: Opens Form Why would this be causing it the amend the URL and to be crawled?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
How do I 301 url's with numbers in them?
I have a number of 404 error pages showing in webmaster tools and some of the url's have numbers, % symbols, and some are pdf's. My usual 301 redirect in my htaccess file does NOT redirect these pages where the url's have special characters. What am I doing wrong?
Technical SEO | | BradBorst0