An SEO expert was testing my site, and noticed that my URLs contained the special character :. He said that would create duplicate content, because google would interpret any url containing : as two separate URLs: one with : and one with %3A. Is he right?
Does URL encoding create duplicate content?
seo;canonical url;url;url encoding
I suspect this is lies/misinterpretation from your SEO expert (such roles do not exist IMO). Essentially %3A and : are exactly the same thing, one is just encoded and means exactly the same thing, anything that reads an URL will know that.Otherwise you could argue that any non-alphanumeric character could cause duplicate content as they all have an URL encoded entity for someing (eg %2d is -).IE:http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/31499/seo-whould-i-use-in-urlandhttp://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/31499/seo%2dwhould%2di%2duse%2din%2durlBoth resolve to the same place, except that - is url encoded in the latter and is what will be honoured by browsers/search engines.