Is it bad to have spaces in the URL? I'm using a CMS and there's only so much I can do. Some of the URLs will have a space but in the URL appearing on the browser, it'll have %2B. I've seen websites with similar URLs, %20. What are your thoughts on this?
Why would you want to have spaces in the URL?? If you really wanted to separate words, you could always use a dash - But I just don't see the point, search engines couldn't care less about it
it has spaces because of how the CMS works. I can't really help it but I'm trying to work around it. It just seems like something that hurts SEO since the URL gets messy with the different symbols.
I may be mistaken, but I believe that some browsers will error as a result of that space when trying to reach that page.
Like you NewComputer, I have encountered problems with some versions of Netscape in regard to this issue. Shannon
I would never recommend spaces because they do look terrible as the URL is rendered in the browser address field. But the reason for separating words in the URL with dashes is that is supposed to allow Google, and I guess other SEs, to read and recognize the individual words or keyword phrases. There has been some debate for at least a year or more now about whether or not Google can parse keywords in continuous URLs. I still tend to believe that the URL "www.my-prime-keyword.com" has a higher optimization value than "www.myprimekeyword.com". But I'd be interested in any arguments or proof to the contrary.
Just do any search and see how that specific keyword is in bold by Google. For example, search for hosting and you can see that google knows that prohosting are 2 words and has hosting in bold. Same thing for webhostingtalk, findmyhosting, etc.
I know that is the basis of the argument, but that bolding is nothing but a string search. I don't see it as any definite proof that Google is actually parsing the phrase and giving relevance value to the bolded word.
Well.. it does prove that Google knows that the URL has that keyword. If you type "wait", you won't get waiter.com with "wait" in bold...
well it's been said by $5000 seo seminar experts... No dash in a domains .... make the domain all one word shorter the better..
Hmm.. nice discussion. I just did an allinurl: search for distance learning, and from the results that turned up, only those which had the two words hyphenated showed. I kept checking for about fifteen pages. Not one single listing where the term appeared as "/distancelearning.html" for e.g. appeared in the results. On the other hand it showed numorous results where the words were capitalized and therefore "not" bolded. This would lead me to believe that distancelearning, although bolded has no allinurl benefit (like what Compar is suggesting), whereas Distance-Learning (not bolded) does.... interesting. Seems to indicate that bolding in itself is no indication of Google ranking on the basis of the terms. That's why I used allinurl to test this.
That exactly what I suspect. I keep repeating this and I don't understand why computer and programming savvy people don't understand or pick up on it, but all you have to do to highlight "wait" instead of waiter in the URL waiter.com is do a string search. You take the letters of the word searched on and you find all matching occurences of those letters. So when someone searches on "wait" you go out and find every occurence of "w a i t" -- without the spaces of course. That is no proof whatsoever that Google is reading the word and applying any value to "wait" versus "waiter". It only proves that they can do string search matching. If you searched on "awit" Google would highlight every occurence of that mispelling of the word. Is anyone suggesting that they could judge a site relevance from this mispelling? But they would highlight it. It's called string search, not word parsing.
Thanks Compar for prompting the discussion. The benefit in this for us is to always use hyphens when creating sub-pages. Not using a hyphen in the domain name could be justified for branding etc. Also, I think MSN and others give wait to un-hyphenated keyword strings in domain and folder names. So when registering domains, both are fine, and no-hyphens *might* have a branding advantage. Not to say that hyphens in domain names are spammy, God forbid... heh In folder names etc. hyphens should always be preferred though.
In these days when every single domain you can think of seems to be registered, sometimes there is no option left than to get a hyphenated domain. I hate them, but I do have a few of them since I couldn't find any decent non-hyhpenated one. But I totally agree in the inner pages, whenever I build a site I usually use hyphens in the inner urls.
Anyone seen SERP preferences for - versus _ in the url? This is another highly debated issue... Sorry for the thread jack...
FOr the current algorithm... hyphen ( - ) is much much better that undescore ( _ ) That's because (for now) GOogle treats hyphen as space, while underscore as just another character Se the url's at www.xperts.ro
That has always been my understanding on the subject also. Dashes, not underscores to separate the words for the search engines.
Hello, Long time since my last post here. Anyway, I use hyphen not only for search engines, but for the people to remind the url or have a better idea about the page content. Regards.