Proper generation of URL

[asantos]

I developed a CMS which has a smart URI system built in. for example:

www.foo.com/about-us/
www.foo.com/about-us/employees/
www.foo.com/news/

... now i need to set some kind of permalink for special sections as "news"

I was thinking of something like this:
www.foo.com/news@2006@05@title-of-post

The question is, does anybody know if the "@" plays well with the SEO rules? What other alternatives could i use?

[mikesmith76]

whats wrong with simply using /

[asantos]

mike,
the "/" is strictly for the section structure of the cms. i must use another character to recognize special data in the uri.
thats why i cant use the /

[mikesmith76]

ok, you could use "-", see that in url's all the time.

just reread your original post and you are using "-" to seperate the keywords and not the date parts - why is that?

[asantos]

actually, i have a gen_slug() function that converts:
This is a post-title

to this:
this_is_a_post-title

(like wordpress does). Thats way i cant use the '-' or '_' characters neither. Do you see a problem using @?

[mikesmith76]

to be honest i have no idea reagarding the seo aspects of using @ in a url. however a quick search on google provided the following

"...Only alphanumerics [0-9a-zA-Z], the special characters "$-_.+!*'()," [not including the quotes - ed], and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL."

Taken from the following site

[blooberry.com ]

if this is any indication it may not be a good idea to use "@".

The period character "." would work in your url and shouldn't pose any problems regarding seo

[asantos]

thanks for the info mike!
im reading about it right now.

[asantos]

ill stick with this structure from now on:

www.foo.com/section-xyz/news+2006,05,title-of-post