thyros
asked on
Search Engine Friendly (SEO) Url's and Special Characters (&$£!"[:]~#?) - Url Length & Other General Advice
I am looking for information and general advice on the use of special characters in the url of my pages and what the implications are in getting picked up by google and search engines in general. In particular, I am looking for confirmation if the use of the following characters will prevent the search engines from spidering my site (or if there are any penalties).
£
$
~
#
[ ]
( )
:
;
?
| (pipe)
Some urls may have accented characters; /capcom-gámé-3-(ps2).html - good or bad?
From what I have seen on our website, the characters : [ ] ( ) | ? have already crept into the urls. I am aware that the ? sign usually means crawlers want to stop reading after that, but what about the others?
Which is better from the following:
1 - site.com/directory/photogr
2 - site.com/directory/photogr
3 - site.com/directory/photogr
Lastly, is there any limitation on the length of the url and it being prevented from coming in the search results? I like to include full descriptive paths in the url to help people travel down the 'breadcrumbs', but is there a general guideline on where to draw the line.
I understand there are many questions here, but I am looking for general advice across the range, and hopefully some confirmation regarding the use of special characters and which ones to avoid.
Thanks!
£
$
~
#
[ ]
( )
:
;
?
| (pipe)
Some urls may have accented characters; /capcom-gámé-3-(ps2).html - good or bad?
From what I have seen on our website, the characters : [ ] ( ) | ? have already crept into the urls. I am aware that the ? sign usually means crawlers want to stop reading after that, but what about the others?
Which is better from the following:
1 - site.com/directory/photogr
2 - site.com/directory/photogr
3 - site.com/directory/photogr
Lastly, is there any limitation on the length of the url and it being prevented from coming in the search results? I like to include full descriptive paths in the url to help people travel down the 'breadcrumbs', but is there a general guideline on where to draw the line.
I understand there are many questions here, but I am looking for general advice across the range, and hopefully some confirmation regarding the use of special characters and which ones to avoid.
Thanks!
Loganathan Natarajan
ok...
Use a robots.txt file for the most part. Read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
And, use a photo program like photoshop (fee), jalbum (free), GIMP (free) to watermark all your images.
http://jalbum.net/
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/index.html
http://www.gimp.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
And, use a photo program like photoshop (fee), jalbum (free), GIMP (free) to watermark all your images.
http://jalbum.net/
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/index.html
http://www.gimp.org/
I'd say that for simplicity, don't add special characters to your web urls.
ASKER
I don't see what watermarking images has to do with this question?
Anyhow as for your second comment, I don't really have much choice to avoid some of the special characters like | [] etc, because they are part of the script/engine powering part of our website database, so we have to use some kind of separators.
I was hoping to get a definitive guide on what characters are rejected outright by popular search engines and which ones are just tolerated, but this question seems like it is going to die soon.
Anyhow as for your second comment, I don't really have much choice to avoid some of the special characters like | [] etc, because they are part of the script/engine powering part of our website database, so we have to use some kind of separators.
I was hoping to get a definitive guide on what characters are rejected outright by popular search engines and which ones are just tolerated, but this question seems like it is going to die soon.
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ASKER
Thanks for your help, this sounds reasonable.