How do you handle spaces in database names?

0o0o0

For example lets say

Cty Toronto Team Maple Leafs
Cty New york Team Rangers
etc..

now calling these from a database and creating a htaccess rewrite..

how do you handle the New (space) York

or the Maple(space) leafs

do you replace string to have %20 in all spaces?? or _ or -

Id like %20 I guess or which ever is known to be best for google searching in urls.

example

www.somesportssite.com/team/Toronto-Maple%20Leafs.html

www.somesportssite.com/team/New%20York-Rangers.html

or should it be Toronto-Maple-Leafs.html

anyone have experience in which works best?? and is it in fact a string replace? and does rewrite handle it ok or is there going to be extra coding on the rewrite?

thanks.

Derokorian

Well I would personally remove spaces but that's me, its entirely up to you - I'm not a fan of %20 simply because its not something the average user can remember. I try to make my urls easy to remember such that someone can type it in without having it bookmarked. For your example I would do:

www.somesportssite.com/team/NewYorkRangers
www.somesportssite.com/team/TorontoMapleLears

Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. TBH I've never seen an SEO difference by having better URLs - I think that's more of a benefit for the user than the search engine.

Bonesnap

I've always used (and seen) spaces replaced by hyphens and the URL is lowercase.

anakadote

urlencode encodes spaces with the plus symbol (+), however for readability and reliability's sake I prefer to replace spaces with either a hyphen or underscore.

jeepin81

I agree w/ Bonesnap w/ the use of hyphens or underscores. One other thing to keep in mind is SEO. Google treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners.

ie: new_york vs new-york

google will index the underscore as 'newyork' and the hyphen as 'new, york'.

just a thought.

NogDog

jeepin81;11005441 wrote:
I agree w/ Bonesnap w/ the use of hyphens or underscores. One other thing to keep in mind is SEO. Google treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners.

ie: new_york vs new-york

google will index the underscore as 'newyork' and the hyphen as 'new, york'.

just a thought.

I'd like to see a source on this, as logically (to me, anyway) it should be the opposite.

PS: Though I note that WordPress uses hyphens, and I suspect Google knows that. 🙂

jeepin81

Source:

Matt Cutts an engineer at google. I believe I've also seen him mention this on his blog.

Here is another video were he discusses the use of hyphens vs underscores.

Otherwise, there are a bunch of articles discussing it - you can find them via a search.

As he mentions it's not a huge deal but it's something to think about.

0o0o0

thanks for the video guy! and thanks for the replies.

this dude said ALOT in almost nothing. rewatch it and think about it the bigger picture.. and the "over 200 part".

😉

I know for a fact seniority is a factor in domians. Thats why I hate taking on new clients starting up, and rather clients with old domains.. and showing them the light of day with a website that never ranked before. In the 90's it was all and only about what the site looked like.. today you can take these sites where the client says "nope never had one email from my website"... to OMG what did you do I get 5-15 job requests a day.

search em out.. theres alot of websites you dont even have to change the look, but the mechanics and simply make a client think your god. JUST BY CHANGING THERE LINKING STRUCTURE. simple as a 2 hour process.. and they are over whelmed with being on page one of a search engine.

thanks guys.

my orginal question was getting to modrewrite and the extra hyphens.. lol but it still sees it as term=$4 as a whole word.. when replace added the hypens so its all good.

jeepin81

umm back in the days it was "who was linking to who" type of strategy for google, yahoo, lycos, etc.... Now-a-days it's content, relevance, trust and 'guessed' as spam. Trust being your online presence: ie: social, reported, valid. I'm not sold on 'microformats' but I went to a conference were W3C was really backing them.

You should read up on googles lastest releases: Google Panda. A couple major changes and lot of minor changes. Also, Google Penguin had some big updates.

SEO is a beast.