+ or - in url ?

Question

Most websites use - (like stackoverflow) but most PHP framework generate + encoded url.

So, what is the best for SEO ? Use + or - as separators ?

Answer 1

A plus is the simplified encoding for a space (used if %20 is not used, though both are equally valid). The '-' has no special meaning in URL encoding and will be decoded as a '-', where '+' will be decoded to a space.

Site like stack overflow must translate spaces to '-' to generate the URL (as opposed to encode the URL).

See the wikipedia article on URL Encoding for more details.

Oh, and to directly answer the question, neither is better or worse for SEO.

Answer 2

the - character is used as part of the permalink format. Typically, permalinks use them in place of spaces but only as part of a title for a forum post or blog article.

Answer 3

+ and - are not equal.

The plus sign is part of the URI encoding spec. as a reserved character. In particular the plus is used as a shorthand notation for a space in the query string (search for "Query strings" and read the information below that heading).

This may lead to in encoding problem where one urlencoding system may use standard percent encoding, where as another would use RFC 1738 URL encoding. So there could be a missmatch between the type of URL string returned. Thus you would have encode any URL which has a '+' as a significant character, and also decode the ensuing URL.

I would suggest as a best practice to not use any reserved characters as a critical part of your URL (read not the querystring) and convert spaces to '-' (dashes). As it could lead to unpredictable results in the future.

I would agree that it probably won't make a SEO difference... as long as the page is browse-able and the content (which is what matters) is index-able by the SE.

Answer 4

according to SEOmoz in one of their blog post regarding URL best practices, hyphens separate best, followed by underscores, and then the pluses (+).

When creating URLs with multiple words in the format of a phrase, hyphens are best to separate the terms (e.g. /brands/dolce-and-gabbana/), followed (in order) by, underscores (_), pluses (+) and nothing.