I am a programmer and working on my site having slug set for SEO friendliness. I wonder whether this URL is OK for Search Engines?
http://example.com/entry/1/clinton-sanders-use-n.h.-primary-to-frame-long-battle-to-come
Note . and .- after n.h
Short answer. Yes. I do this all the time without issue.
In fact, you do not have to search Google very long to see other examples where a period (.), dash (-), underscore (_), etc. are used. There are some characters that have special meaning that you should be aware of.
From this page: http://www.skorks.com/2010/05/what-every-developer-should-know-about-urls/
The list is:
; / ? : @ & = + $ ,
Avoid these and you should generally be fine. As well, when you have the time, the page I linked to is a programmer talking specifically on the topic in question so you may want to read what he has to say.
i would like to say no. an URL in my old school influented opinion, should not contain anything beside 0-9a-z and - (_is a worst case). On the other side, in the Unicode times (now) when even cyrillic characters are fully supported as URLs signs, a point (in your URL) doesn't differ very much from any cyrillic character. So i must say yes, it is pretty seo conform.
