Use of the tilde in URLs

[fdb]

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.

[ShaMenz]

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 help@seomoz.org.

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

[StalkerB]

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.

[STPseo]

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.

[fdb]

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.