Do spaces in your URL (%20) have a negative impact on SEO?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2547783/do-spaces-in-your-url-20-have-a-negative-impact-on-seo

or

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2547783/do%20spaces%20in%20your%20url%2020%20have%20a%20negative%20impact%20on%20seo

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

As mentioned, it really doesn't matter from a search engine perspective. With that being said, however, it's generally not good practice to use spaces in URLs (%20). Replace it with a dash or concatenate it.