spaces in url's

does google list pages with spaces in the URL's?

 

According to me

There will be no space in a domains URL

But I think you are asking about some thing like

http://www.sample.com/ad%df.html

 

im talking about urls like www.sample.com/hi there.html

does google index them?

 

Yes they do..
I have many...

 

I'm not sure...

http://www.google.com/search?q=alli...s=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

 

they do, it looks a bit messy but they do, you can use hyphens and dots (dunno why dots) to seperate page names too, underscores don't seperate the words, they join them together

HTH

 

It's bad practice to use spaces. Replace them with -.

 

And this is what I always tell people, and our programmers.

But although I understand that it's better for the user to avoid spaces (Cleaner looking urls etc), is there any actual SEO reason for not using spaces (%20) in urls? I can't think of any..

 

Spiders may have trouble crawling urls with special characters such as % in them.

 

Google dislikes spaces within urls. I think its something to do with dynamic pages i cant remember. It WILL have a negative effect on your SEO to use spaces.

 

I thought search engines saw them the same, just that hyphens were easier to read

this%20is%20not%20easy%20to%20read

where-this-is-easy-to-read

I know underscores are bad news

 

May I ask why underscores are bad news?

 

I wouldn't call them bad news but dashes are preferred over underscores

 

I see. I have a few underscores for my pages and they do great in the engines. Do you think I should change my urls over?

 

Yes, dashes are preferred but the others are fine

 

I've got a page that's doing brilliantly in the SERPs with spaces in the file name. I also never knew about the underscores, and have loads of pages like that too. I don't think it makes too much difference.

 

Mind posting the page's url here?

 

Glad you asked overdrive the way the search engines see some things such as the hyphen "-", dots "." and I think even a space "%20" as word breaks (so 2 words are seperated).

An Underscore is seen as joining words together which can be a problem as "car_hire" to a search engine looks like "carhire", where as "car-hire" looks like "car hire"

That is a tricky question as all your pages with Underscores in will loose there SERPs and will make the whole site smaller in the search engines eyes until they find the new pages, so hyphens are better in the long run, it will hurt - like hell - to change over

HTH

Edit - just read Matt post that eXe found that says practically everything I just posted

 

i see these url's indexed all the time.

 

none of us said the search engines hate them so they won't rank, just saying the search engines see _ wierd but still perfectly indexable and rankable (even though - is better for rankings)