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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.

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.