Use of the tilde in URLs
-
I just signed up for SEOMoz and sent my site through the first crawl. I use the tilde in my rewritten URLs. This threw my entire site into the Notice section 301 (permanent redirect) since each page redirects to the exact URL with the ~, not the %7e.
I find conflicting information on the web - you can use the tilde in more recent coding guidelines where you couldn't in the old.
It would be a huge thing to change every page in my site to use an underscore instead of a tilde int he URL. If Google is like SEOMoz and is 301 redirecting every page on the site, then I'll do it, but is it just an SEOMoz thing?
I ran my site through Firebug and and all my pages show the 200 response header, not the 301 redirect.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
-
Thanks for all the advice! I realized that Google doesn't care about the tilde -- or at least is not doing the same redirect as SEOMoz. Recently one of my older sitemaps was flagged by Google with errors because too many of the files were redirecting. All of my sitemaps would be flagged if pages were redirecting on a wide scale.
My pages generally rank in the top 5 in Google and maybe losing the tilde would get me to #1, so I'll keep it in mind for the future. Thanks again for the help.
-
We use tildes pretty heavily on our new site. They seem to be okay with Google. However I did not want to use them because some foreign keyboards do not include the character... like Mexico.
So... do folks in Mexico type in our URLs by hand? Probably not common... but it is a potential problem. It is missing from other keyboards as well.
We use the tilde because we think it helps break up words we do not want to be seen as "together" in a string. All my product URLs have the product name, separated by dashes, then we use the tilde then comes the product number. We think it may help Google see the product title as a complete string and not include the product number. Not sure if it works or not.
-
Tildes are okay these days, but 'unsafe'.
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/rfc/2396/full.html#2.3
Tilde was (begrudgingly) added to the unreserved character list a while ago, so Google should treat them fine without encoding.
However, if you can avoid using them I would, so leave the old addresses but from now on I'd use a hyphen (in preference to an underscore, still) instead of a tilde if you can.
-
Hi,
Since this is really about the way that the tool works, the quickest and most accurate way of getting the correct answer would be to email [email protected].
That being said, avoiding special characters would be our company's preferred option. This thread from Google Webmaster Central would be worth a read.
Sha
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
-
Unsolved Ooops. Our crawlers are unable to access that URL
hello
Moz Pro | | ssblawton2533
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 ?0 -
Can using url builder for campaign tracking impact link equity?
We have used the URL builder tools for building custom links that are placed on our referrer websites mainly for campaign tracking in Google Analytics, but when you use a shortened link on another website how does that impact the the link juice or equity? Is there any negative impact on the link rankings? Or should you provide the specific landing page url to the company that will be posting a link to your site?
Moz Pro | | CSobus0 -
Major Drop in URLs that Received Organic Search Visits
Hi there! I can't figure out this issue. We had a major drop in URLS receiving organic search visits (according to Koz) yet our traffic hasn't seemed to drop in correlation. Our site had a major issue at the end of may (*hence the drop in search traffic) but it seems to have recovered, yet URLs that Received Organic Search Visits has dropped dramatically. I've looked at Google updates but can't seem to find anything, what am I missing? NVun4Wq
Moz Pro | | DotP0 -
Where does the crawler find the urls?
The SEO Moz crawler has found a number of 500 error pages, and 404s etc which is very useful 🙂 however some of the urls are weird/broken formats we don't recognise and nobody remembers ever using - not weird enough to imply hacking, but something broken in the CMS Is there anyway to find out where the crawler found these urls? I can patch up and redirect the end result as best I can but I would prefer to fix plug the leak thanks 🙂
Moz Pro | | Fammy1 -
Tool for tracking actions taken on problem urls
I am looking for tool suggestions that assist in keeping track of problem urls, the actions taken on urls, and help deal with tracking and testing a large number of errors gathered from many sources. So, what I want is to be able to export lists of url's and their problems from my current sets of tools (SEOmoz campaigns, Google WM, Bing WM,.Screaming Frog) and input them into a type of centralized DB that will allow me to see all of the actions that need to be taken on each url while at the same time removing duplicates as each tool finds a significant amount of the same issues. Example Case: SEOmoz and Google identify urls with duplicate title tags (example.com/url1 & example.com/url2) , while Screaming frog sees that example.com/url1 contains a link that is no longer valid (so terminates in a 404). When I import the three reports into the tool I would like to see that example.com/url1 has two issues pending, a duplicated title and a broken link, without duplicating the entry that both SEOmoz and Google found. I would also like to see historical information on the url, so if I have written redirects to it (to fix a previous problem), or if it used to be a broken page (i.e. 4XX or 5XX error) and is now fixed. Finally, I would like to not be bothered with the same issue twice. As Google is incredibly slow with updating their issues summary, I would like to not important duplicate issues (so the tool should recognize that the url is already in the DB and that it has been resolved). Bonus for any tool that uses Google and SEOmoz API to gather this info for me Bonus Bonus for any tool that is smart enough to check and mark as resolved issues as they come in (for instance, if a url has a 403 error it would check on import if it still resolved as a 403. If it did it would add it to the issue queue, if not it would be marked as fixed). Does anything like this exist? how do you deal with tracking and fixing thousands of urls and their problems and the duplicates created from using multiple tools. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | prima-2535090 -
Where do these URL's come from?! (Indexation issues)
We have an international webshop with languages in the URLs. Our URLs are now set up as follows: http://thermalunderwear.eu/eng/category/product Now, we know that there's some kind of strange redirect problem causing problems with our indexation, this is a technical issue that should be fixed soon. But whether this is the cause of some other strange problems, I do not know. I'd be happy with any help/advice/tips. 1. The SEOmoz site crawler starts at http://thermalunderwear.eu. This currently does not yet redirect to http://thermalunderwear.eu/eng like we want it to, but all the links on the page do include the default language code. So all links on the page are http://thermalunderwear.eu/eng/category etc. However, apart from those URLs, the site crawler finds many URLs in the form http://thermalunderwear.eu/category/product etc., so not including the language variable. Where it gets these I do not know, and since these URLs dont exist and the webshop simply shows the homepage, these URLs all have 50+ duplicate titles/content. Why oh why? 2. If I do a Google search for indexed URL's with English as language, I get many results formatted like this: Coldpruf Enthusiast mens thermal shirt - Thermal wear for men ...
Moz Pro | | DocdataCommerce
thermalunderwear.eu/eng/men/coldpruf-enthusiast-mens-thermal-shirt 170+ items – Fine-ribbed longsleeve thermal shirt men from Enthusiast ... {$SCRIPT_NAME} eng/men/coldpruf-enthusiast-mens-the {$ajax_url} http://thermalunderwear.eu/ajax What are those variables doing there? It looks like it's taking something from our Smarty debug console, which is hidden but still active in the source code, but also the ajax URL which is in a completely different location. What is Google trying to show here?0 -
How to Use Open Site Explorer
I've used Open Site Explorer here at SEOmoz for the first time and I'm confused by the results. I'm wondering how dated the results are? And, what are they based on? For example, I'm certain my facebook shares and like are higher...same with the twitter links. It seems kind of old?! One of my competitors who gets about 2x more traffic than me DOES have great backlinks. I know that. BUT, it's odd that her facebook and twitter results are what they are compared to mine - they're WAY higher in site explorer AND her links seem on par with her facebook page whereas mine don't. Whereas mine seem WAy Way lower than what they are in reality. She barely tweets and facebooks any more. Maybe once per month. She started out gangbusters, but doesn't do it much any more. That's kinda why I'm wondering if it's based on older stuff and not updated often? Anyone know?
Moz Pro | | annasus0 -
Metrics from Linkscape - DJ Passed, URL mozRank Passed and funny numbers
Hello, Hoping someone can help me understand the difference between the Domain Juice Passed and some interesting numbers found in the exported CSV file. I ran the Advanced Link Intelligence Report and focusing on the Links to Domain metrics. It looks like the report is sorted by mozRank passed but next to each link we are given the DJ Passed instead. Why is that? My confusion is compounded by the fact that when I export the CSV of this report it no longer includes the DJ Passed numbers but does show URL mozRank Passed instead. For Example, on the web version of the Advanced Link Intelligence Report the top link is: http://www.holdenouterwear.com/shop.php with mozRank: 5.56 mozTrust: 5.95 and DJ Passed: 4.49 In the CSV file we don't get the DJ passed but get the URL mozRank Passed of: 0.00051 Looking at the CSV file further some links have URL mozRank Passed of 4.00E-05 Anyone has a clear explanation of why DJ Passed is not in the CSV file and how the mozRank passed is calculated? And what the 4.00E-05 mean? Thank you.
Moz Pro | | miloszpekala0