SEN Forum Top Pick: SEO effects when incorrectly labeling pages or images

"13 years ago when I didn't know better I named pages and image with spaces in the middle of a name. Every time a pro looks at my site they remind me of it. My question is "Does the poor usage affect my Google rating?" We are on Google's first page and have been for quite a long time. I don't want to risk changing that.

brettsmith: My suggestion is if it's not broke don't fix it. Google understands the spaces as %20 encoding. There is a way you could do a rewrite in your .htaccess file but again - if your happy with your rankings I would not mess with it until you are ready to do a redesign or something. Hope that helps!

johnheard SEN's Head Researcher: I'll second Brett's recommendation on leaving it alone, it may not look great but they are not likely hurting you in any way. Just leave the old URLs alone, but do avoid spaces on new content, new URLs that you create and slowly phase out those URLs over time.

Keep up on this conversation & join in within SEN's Forum here:

https://forum.searchenginenews.com/t/seo-effects-when-incorrectly-labeling-pages-or-images/177

...