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What Happens When A Bunch of Random Special Characters Sneak Into Your URLs?

Written by: Adrienne Kmetz Tags: technical-seo

Published: Jun 28, 2025

A community member inherited some URLs with a few special characters like commas, parentheses, carrots, asterisks, hashes, and question marks.

What happens to a URL when special characters are inserted into a permalink?

Depending on the character, engines and browsers may treat it differently. Google explains in its guide to URL encoding: "Some characters cannot be part of a URL (for example, the space) and some other characters have a special meaning in a URL."

For example, John Mueller said, the "URLs with "#" in them probably have gotten cut off - the "#" & following is not considered a part of the indexable URL."

To avoid URLs getting cut off or not indexing at all, characters like < > carrots, | pipe characters, % percent signs and #, must be encoded "as HTML variants" using corresponding codes. 

Tory Gray, owner of the technical seo agency Gray Dot Company, sheds more detailed light for us on what this means. She explains the impact: 

Why it matters: Duplicate URLs split link equity

1. Typically the encoded version is what gets indexed
2. But typically the non-encoded version is what gets linked to, because that’s what’s visible on a website (or, both get links)
3. Resulting in the relative under performance of the indexed URL – it’s not getting the full equity

A canonical tag pointing to the correct variant can solve the issue