Does using spaces in a URL affect SEO?

Question

When creating URLs for my website I need to use a space, for example http://mydomain.com/start home

I've seen some sites using + or -, what are the advantages of using space, + and - (dashes) in SEO?

What is better to use for URL formatting? Should I use http://mydomain.com/start-home or http://mydomain.com/start+home?

Solution 1

Yes don't use + symbols in your URL's it's much better to use - as - tells google these are separate words. And - are most common form of SEO friendly URL's

Solution 2

Spaces in URLs are bad for two reasons: 1) when you copy the URL, it may have an ugly %20 in it to represent the space; 2) on older browsers, copying the URL may leave a space in the URL, so when pasting the link into another webpage like a forum post, the URL will become broken like this:

example.com/my cool page

The only part that will get hyperlinked is:

example.com/my

That will cause a 404 error on your site, and not give you the SEO link juice.

Dashes are best:

example.com/my-cool-page

Solution 3

A space when you do a link is converted to '%20' being http://mydomain.com/start%20home its dirty...

Using - instead of + or _ or ' '(space) is for google:

start_home for google is "start_home"
start+home for google is "start+home"
start-home for google is "start","home", "home start", "start home"

Comments

[MrWhite]

It is debatable whether Google treats the underscore as a word seperator these days. Historically no. But in 2007, Matt Cutts said this was changing and that Google would now be treating underscores like hyphens in terms of word separation. However, this might have taken some time to be implemented, but this recent article suggests that underscores are actually better than hyphens!

[Shrik]

I am curios if there's literature to back this claim ? When it comes to URL encoding +, - and space are different characters. So why would google care more for minus than + ? Shouldn't it favor %20 (which is space) and is intended for that purpose?

[topher]

Firefox 40 also replaces the %20s with spaces. This causes the copy pasting problem.