Is using dots in URL path really a problem?

[lcourse]

we have a couple of pages displaying a dot in the URL path like

domain.com/mr.smith/widget-mr.smith

It displays fine in chrome, firefox and IE and for the user it may actually look better than replacing it by _ or -.

Did this ever cause problems to anybody?
Any statement from google about it?
Should I change existing URLs?

If so, which other characters can I use in the URL instead of underscore and dash, since in our system dash and underscore are already used for rewriting other characters.

Thanks

[AndersS]

Hi!

As far as I know, this really isn't a huge problem (could be mistaken). I guess it depends...

In regards to readability, I prefer using dashes (-), as they tend to be easier to read. Underscores may be mistaken for a space). Here's what Matt Cutts had to say about this some years ago: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/ (and http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/)

I believe I have read that Google and other search engines read URLs like this when looking for semantic meanings:

• /this-is-part-of-a-website-address = this is part of a website address
• /this_is_part_of_a_website_address = thisispartofawebsiteaddress

At least that used to be the case...It could be changed now.

In your example, I would not obsess too much about it, as it gives perfect semantic meaning. Have you considered removing special characters, instead of replacing them with a "-" ?

Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Anders

[Adam_Cochran]

While I've never come across this exact problem before I can share with you one my mantras that applies here:

"If a system (browser, search engine, etc) needs to perform a data re-write, you aren't accessible enough."

Google loves accessibility. It always wants the user to be able to easily access information and it wants it's spiders to be able to easily index and categorize the information. When accessibility options such as javascript versioning or if a site is using flash or not have an impact then it would only logically follow that more obvious structural access issues do come into effect.

From a technology stand point I can tell you that "." is not traditionally used in the scope of a URL/file structure as it a reserved character and therefore your structure is being re-written to display those. Much like international domains like the chinese internationalized domain name extension .中国 (which is basically a visual re-encode of the unicode: xn--fiqs8s) For the sake of accessibility, proper structure formatting and system practicality you should avoid using non-standard characters such as the . in your url

[Adam_Cochran]

Hi Andrews,

While the difference between dashes and underscores use to be a big issue a few years back its something that seems to hold minimal merit now. The two can be used rather interchangeably without any major impact. This was phased out around the same time as exact-match-domain value was as far too many people were abusing the long-tail dash page method.