url question

[va_mom]

Hello guys. My client has an ecommerce site and his url has % because there were spaces and it looks odd.

Since it is opencart, we can change the url to make it 'friendlier' and just put '-' instead of just spaces but it will take a while because he already has about 2000 products. And there were also many backlinks made with his urls with % (or spaces).

Will search engines see these odd urls as negative or it will not matter?

I hope somebody can shed light on this topic, please.

Thank you! :-)

[rahmanpaidar]

No penalize for spaces in url. Things that are odd in people's eyes are not too odd
for computer algorithms. You could do a correction in your urls for people to better
recognize and remember your urls.

If you change the url, or rename your directories or files on the server, you will
lose all the correspondant page rank for that page beside the fact that you will
recieve a pile of duplicated contents and title duplications errors in your GWT.
Better you setup a redirection but that takes a huge amount of time since you
need to do a redirection for all the url you want to correct, one by one.

I recommend to leave it as is.

[UMS]

An encoded space in a URL isn't an issue. If you did rename all the URL's, you would want to ensure that you create a 301 redirect so that you don't loose any link juice.

[va_mom]

Thank you for your replies - i will just suggest to the client to leave it as is. And for the future products, he should put "-" in between.

Cheers!