Menu
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?
227
While it's true that two websites with exactly the same strength may rank differently with and without that space, SEO is just too complex for that to ever be possible in the real world.
Since URLs often contain characters outside the ASCII set, the URL has to be converted into a valid ASCII format. URL encoding replaces unsafe ASCII characters with a "%" followed by two hexadecimal digits. URLs cannot contain spaces.
Great user experience is the most important factor when it comes to SEO. Improve your user experience by using a logical URL structure with page hierarchies. Intuitively organized content makes your website easier to navigate for humans.
The space character is unsafe because significant spaces may disappear and insignificant spaces may be introduced when URLs are transcribed or typeset or subjected to the treatment of word-processing programs.
No impact on SEO. A - just looks nicer, that's all.
You'd use %20 if you needed to preserve the exact term including a proper space when you read it back from the URL. Probably you don't.
69
I personally think it should be "-"
I don't remember seeing a website that was using %20
"-" is one character and %20 is three, so you can put more stuff visible in the address bar
for an example, what is better
Do spaces in your URL (%20) have a negative impact on SEO?
or
Do spaces in your URL (%20) have a negative impact on SEO?
33
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.
43
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
