Do encoded URLs have better SEO than slugs?

Question

I can't think of an example, but hopefully you get the idea. Encoded URLs have some characters replaced with those weird %20% type of codes (so I think none of the original characters/meaning is lost) whereas slugs have all the special characters stripped off and white spaces replaced usually with dashes or plus sign ('-' or '+').

Answer 1

The encoding that is used for URLs is not as weired as it may look. It is simply needed to represent characters in URLs that would otherwise not be allowed or inconvenient. A search engine crawler is able to decode them and to get the original meaning back. If you have something like foreign language letters in words that would otherwise be garbled it will very likely make a difference for the search engine. So if you expect to have such words in URLs and if they may be important key words for your site I would suggest to use proper URL encoding in favor of stripping the special characters. Although for simple non letter characters, i.e. the mentioned %20 which is a space character you may continue to use +, - or . as a replacement if you prefer that.

Answer 2

As mentionned earlier, you would have to guess because Google would not give that informations, but one important point is for the user favorites/historic, would you prefer reading

yoursite.com/your-folder/your article

or

yoursite.com/your%20folder/your%20article

this is a simple article name and the first solution look easier to read, image with a name like this question url

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3481416/do-encoded-urls-have-better-seo-than-slugs

or

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3481416/do%20encoded%20urls%20have%20better%20seo%20than-slugs