Very odd behavior. Google is changing “%20” to “+” in my URLS

[SheffieldMarketing]

I just realized many of the links on my site are BROKEN when entered from a Google SERP. This didn’t used to be this way. I have no idea what’s going but I’m worried.

It involves a folder of our site that has a space in it. Google is even displaying the proper “%20” in the SERP but when I click the link it replaces that “%20” with a + which breaks the link!!

You can see this in action by typing in “brown jordan sheffield furniture” without quotes into Google. You’ll see our site come up first and displaying this link sheffieldfurniture.com/Other%20Furniture/BrownJordan.html but when you click it the link is broken!

This is happening on many of our pages! Anyone know what in the world is going on?

[brad.s.knutson]

I don't think it's Google that is causing the problem, perhaps it's the browser.

In Chrome, I searched for your keyword.  I noticed the '%20' (the HTML character for a space) in the URL of the first result.  When I moused over the result, the HREF that showed had a space in the URL in place of the '%20'.  When I clicked on the result, it correctly sent me to your page, and did not replace '%20' with a '+' symbol - which can also be used to replace a space.

Have you tried writing .htaccess redirects to send users to the correct page if they encounter a situation where they are attempting to hit the + URL when they should hit the '%20' URL?

[SheffieldMarketing]

Hmm interesting, now that you mention it. This issue isn't happening for me in Safari, IE or Firefox but it is happening in Chrome.

I have not, I don't do much with .htacccess and when I've tried it hasn't worked hah. Not sure how I would go about doing that.