File or folder/directory names that contain spaces ( or other special characters ) will cause this. Consider replacing spaces with hypens eg "red-widget" in place of "red widget"

Welcome to the forum.

Every "%" followed by a two digit hexadecimal number is a URL encoded character. eg. "%20" (decimal 32) is a space.

Thank you for the tips!

Do having these "%" signs effect my google rating in any way? If not I may just keep them as they are, and make sure any new pages do not do this.

[edited by: Boulder90 at 11:10 am (utc) on April 5, 2008]

Am not aware of any direct effect on ranking, but those (few?) users who read url in search results will find it harder to decipher.

Are your links URL encoded actually in the source of your page? Or do they only appear URL encoded when you mouse over the link, or follow the link in the browser (ie. the browser is URL encoding the link for you)?

Ideally they should be encoded in the source of the page, although I think modern browsers will probably handle most instances of non-URL encoded links OK? However, I have read that older versions of Netscape / Opera have had problems with this? Not sure.

In short, make sure they work OK in the browsers you are supporting.

Hi Penders -

They are actually encoded in the source of the page.

My main front page looks like this:

generic.com (normal)

all the other links on the site looks like this:

generic.com/generic%20nameofpage%20word/name%20park/

Thanks for the replies on this, I appreciate it. Just wonder if I should go back and remove the spaces if this is hurting search engine optimization. It's a new site and I got a couple first Google page queries with these links, so maybe it's not too bad. I just wouldn't want to have to go through the indexing thing again. But if the current situation makes it harder to get customers, I would do that in a second.

Since my site is young, I am going back and putting "-" inbetween all the words in the link so they look much nicer.

Good decision, get any disruption over know.

Sounds like your editor coded them for you. Slightly off topic but if you have also used mixed case in names then watch out for FTP programs that "correct" everything to lower case on upload. Better of course to use all lower case linked with dashes.

Well, just some feedback on this for those who have "ugly" links. I changed every link on the site to "pretty", renamed all my images accurately and my google page rank jumped 4 points after the next crawl.

renamed all my images accurately

Good move, should help with both google and google image traffic.