Is space in file name, a big issue ?

Does it really matter in SEO?

[Murali]

Hi

My website contains hundreds of pages with space in file name. I heard some SE spider won't accept space in filename.

Whether I have to replace the space with hyphen or underscore in all the files (about 400 files)?

Is it really matter in SEO?

Please help me

thank you

Murali

[encyclo]

The question you should really be asking yourself is: are the search engines successfully spidering my site? If you look at your logs for visits from spiders, and do a site:www.example.com search for your domain in Google, you can see whether the pages with spaces in the filenames are in the index.

If they are indexed correctly, then it's best not to change them, despite the fact that having spaces in filenames is far from ideal. If the pages are not indexed or indexed poorly, then it would be a good idea to replace the spaces with hyphens, and redirect the old pages to the equivalent new ones.