what is the impact of escaped characters on seo-friendly urls?

Question

I have a site that displays products - in the simplest sense the url of the page for a particular product is:

site.com/products/manufacturer_model - so for example if I was displaying a Dell Latitude D700 laptop my URL would look like:

site.com/products/dell_latitude_d700

I have a number of products that contain characters that I would need to URL escape - so for example a Dell Latitude 12?34. Obviously I cannot include the '?' character in the URL. For the purpose of being SEO-friendly - should I ignore that character? e.g.

site.com/products/dell_latitude_1234

Or should I escape it? e.g.

site.com/products/dell_latitude_12%3F34

Seems like escaping it would be the most logical approach - but do crawlers understand this?

Answer 1

Well, using "_" is not so friendly to users, so I think using "-" is better (check seoMOZ beginners guide).

Also, you would like to check what characters really need escaping on RFC 3986. If you are using PHP, check out urlencode function page at php.net. I wrote a function to make this updated conversion a few months ago ;)

But getting back to your main question, do use escaped (when needed per RFC 3986) for writing your URLs. It is the safe path to not getting stuck or penalized.