Reputation: 13226

Do spaces in your URL (%20) have a negative impact on SEO?

All the articles I Googled on this subject are dated back in 2004-2005.

Basically I am structuring precanned searches, and it is based off of categories the client will input.

Example

content/(term name)/index.htm

Does it matter if I used the raw term with a space, which is converted to %20 in the URL, or should I convert the link to '-' and remove that before querying for results?

I already have it working, but does anyone know if this definitely has a negative impact on SEO and ranking?

Upvotes: 16

Answers (13)

Nicolas Bouvrette

Reputation: 4777

Something else to consider is that if you use spaces in your URLs, it will break automatic URL detection in many software (e.g. emails, chat, etc) where they think that a space is the end of URL. This might impact negatively the "sharability" of your URLs.

Using spaces in URLs is still not common practice in 2020 and Google still recommends to use - instead: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en

Upvotes: 0

Adil Mirza

Reputation: 21

%20 does not effects SEO but it will destroy the readability of your URL. since the CMS have taken all the intention, so now it's easy to set-up dynamic URL structure. I recently read an article on SEO Friendly URLS which will help you to avoid

Google penalty

improve your chances to rank

and

make your links meaningful

hope it helps.

Upvotes: 2

Display name

Reputation: 418

yes they do have negative effect as it effects the user experiences. the users would like to have easy to remember urls. google suggest you should seperetae your words with ' - ' and ideally not to use '_' or spaces '%20' .

Upvotes: 0

itft

Reputation: 1

according to my view spaces do have negative impact on seo. and secondly when creating a url structure hypens should be placed instead of underscores.

Upvotes: 0

Peer365.com Internet Marketing

Reputation: 31

Yes don't use them - Google, Yahoo and bing does not know how to leverage the spaces and more importantly you are wasting good opportunity to communicate both with the consumer and search engines more about your product or page URL and what the topic of the content is all about.

However, sometimes it can't be helped because you have a website / ecommerce site for years and the site is indexed and already on good page ranking.

In that case, if you do want to get better naming convention, you will want to re-name the urls but take all of the existing url with space and place it into 301 redirect and map them to the new urls.

Upvotes: 2

michaelle duster

Reputation: 1

according to my view spaces in url should not be there as this is not good practice. we should use hypens between the URLS. the website should have sitemap.xml file.

Upvotes: 0

John Powers

Reputation: 21

We use "%20" all over the place on our website and have not experienced any negative effects. We began doing this about two years ago, and at that time a few search engines had problems, but they have since disappeared. Some browsers will display a "%20" in the address bar, while others will display an empty space, but this really doesn't matter.

We're not so sure though that this has any positive effect on ranking, though it definitely has no negative effect. The thing to remember about Google is that while having a keyword as part of the base url, such as www.greatwidgets.com, is very helpful, using keywords as part of the page url, example: www.myexample.com/widgets.htm does not appear to result in any advantage. What matters is the page content and how many other pages out there have the exact same content. Also, incoming links from relevant websites with high rankings, without the rel="nofollow" tag are extremely important.

You cannot "trick" Google with fancy-looking URLs and h1 headers. That's right, h1 headers mean nothing, because Google doesn't require your input to tell them what's important.

Remember, if you're selling products and copying content from the manufacturer's website (or the competitor's website), Google's PANDA is going to be very angry. You'll need to reword your content so that it's not a verbatim copy from some other website. Google rewards originality, and severely punishes plagiarism. Seriously, PANDA will put the offending page on page 50 until it's brought into conformity with Google's policy on duplicate content.

Always use sitemaps to help the search engines.

Upvotes: 1

Markus Webber

Reputation: 1

It's better to use "-" instead of %20 since it shows unprofessional coding to the search engines and to the visitors. You really think a visitor could remember a URL with %20 ? Make the pages for the users and not for the search engines. You will get the most benefit form this and SE will appreciate it.

Upvotes: 0

Dav

Reputation: 150

I believe it looks better in a link if an underscore (_) is used.

content/term_name/index.htm

content/term-name/index.htm

content/term%20name/index.htm

Upvotes: 0

JaiV

Reputation: 19

I use blogger and while adding labels to blog post, the link to that label page has space which is converted to "%20" but i have no control over that with blogger. When I try to make the labels with '-' instead of space they are not nice to humans, so i go with spaces and "%20" in urls, i think this should not affect SERPs.

Upvotes: 1

mdvaldosta

Reputation: 291

As mentioned, it really doesn't matter from a search engine perspective. With that being said, however, it's generally not good practice to use spaces in URLs (%20). Replace it with a dash or concatenate it.

Upvotes: 1