Ok to Put a Decimal in a URL?

[CodyWheeler]

I'm in the process of creating new product specific URLs for my company. Some of our products have decimals in them for their names as a unit of measurement.

For example - .The URL for a 050" widget would be something like:

http://www.example.com/product/category/.050-inch-widget

My question is - Can I use a decimal in the URL without ticking off the search engines, and/or causing any other unexpected effects?

[CodyWheeler]

Thanks guys. This is an interesting case indeed. Maybe it's just me being an SEO, but I tend to look at the URL on a good majority of the pages I hit. I don't want to confuse my users or provide them with inaccurate information.

.4mm and 4mm is a big difference.

I'm going to try out the decimal point and see how it behaves. I'll report back once we get the pages up.

[wojkwasi]

I'd be inclined to remove the decimal point.. reduces the URL by 1 character Use the title & meta tags for this

[Highland]

As long as it's not a reserved URL character it should be fine. A file name that starts with a dot might cause issues with some web servers but not Google. Avoid using other reserved punctuation, however (i.e. ?, &, etc)