Would this hurt me when SEO

[4thaloveofdough]

Would "Amateur%20Sex.html" hurt me when I am SEO my site for using %20 for the blank character?

[Useless]

Use hyphens instead.

this-is-my-url.html. Don't use actual spaces in filenames and don't use %20 in their place. I doubt that SE bots get tripped by encoded URLs, but I have read about Google's sitemap validator being tripped up by endcoded spaces in urls. So, why risk it?

[4thaloveofdough]

thanks UW, I didn't think so but was curious on what others thought.

[mikeg]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/ :)

[Useless]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/ :)What's your point? Or don't you have one?

[Simon]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/ :)
As Halfdeck mentioned in another thread, things have recently changed regarding how dashes and underscores are seen by Google and other engines...

It's Not Just Google That Treats Underscores Like Dashes (http://searchengineland.com/070802-125851.php)

And to get back to the first question of the thread, my advice would be to stay away from leaving spaces in your URLs for now. Later, when you have plenty of pages with no spaces in the search engines, you can run some tests using spaces in page names.


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