Absolute urls

[patmatt]

I am redesigning my website with an updated theme.
One of the theme plugins takes my url: https://example-site.com/1st-level-page/2nd-level-page/page-content

and changes it to https%3A%2F%2Fexample-site.com%21st-level-page%22nd-level-page/page-content%2F

Does this effect how a web crawler see's my internal links?
Can this have a negative effect on my SEO?
Should I edit the plugin to force it to render the url exactly as written?

[JohnSammon]

Hey Pat,

Any chance you can put the URL's in a word doc and pop a screen shot into the thread? I'm seeing % in the URL and I'm not sure if it's actually putting that in there.

If it's changing your URL structure, you'll need to do 301 redirects (one to one) in order to preserve the SEO equity. If you can edit the plugin to keep the old URL structure, that would be preferred.

Thanks!

John

[patmatt]

Hi John!

Thanks for the feedback. Greatly appreciated.

Screenshot attached.

When I "view source" on a webpage in browser, the url is displayed exactly as needed. Does that matter? Or is that entirely different from the crawlers?

eMChRp

[JohnSammon]

Yikes! Does it display that way in the browser? Is it possible to show how it looks in a browser?

The % shows when there are spaces in the domain name. You definitely don't want that URL structure - it's bad news.

[patmatt]

No. It only displays the extra code in the word press text editor. The browser displays it properly.

Something is converting the "/" to %. There are no spaces in the url.

As I mentioned in my previous response, if I "view source" in the browser window the internal urls are all correct so I am at a loss.

Appreciate your help.

[patmatt]

So after researching this, I'm being told that this is called url encoding. So the question really is, does URL encoding negatively effect internal linking and crawlers and can it negatively effect SEO?

[jasongmcmahon]

Hello Patrick

• Do the links still work?
• What Plugin are you using & why does it encode the URLs?

[patmatt]

HI Joe. Yes. Links still work flawlessly. And if you view page source, they look perfect.

Here's a button I just made in the theme.

http://starttheme2.wpengine.com/url-encoding/

If you hover over it you can see the url is perfect. But the url it's coded in the page like this:

https%3A%2F%2Fmoz.com%2Fabout%2Fteam%2Fbritney-muller

I'm not sure what plugin is causing this. If you want to have a look you most certainly are welcome to.
https://starttheme2.wpengine.com/wp-admin/

UN: demo
PW: St#rtTh#m#2018