1.8 URL structure & internationalisationMediumInferred
Special characters/spaces in URLs
Spaces and unencoded special characters in URLs break links and look untrustworthy. URLs should use clean, encoded, predictable characters.
What it is
Unencoded or awkward characters.
Why it matters
Encoding issues, broken links, duplication.
How to fix it
Use clean ASCII slugs.
How to find it on your site
- Scan URLs for spaces, accents or special characters.
- Check whether they appear unencoded or awkwardly encoded.
- Replace spaces with hyphens and avoid special characters in slugs.
- Ensure anything that must remain is correctly percent-encoded.
Cross-reference to ranking and citation factors
Messy or unencoded URLs can break sharing and crawling and undermine trust. Clean URLs are more robust and more clickable.
Impact
Low-medium. Inferred.
Evidence
Keep URLs simple and clean. Google Search Central, Keep a simple URL structure