How important are clean URLs?

[Gavo]

Just wanting to understand the importance of clean URLs in regards to SEO effectiveness.

Currently, we have URLs for a site that reads as follows: http://www.interhampers.com.au/c/90/Corporate Gift Hampers

Should we look into modifying this so that the URL does not have % or figures?

[sureshchowdary]

Definitely you should look into modifying the url structure. % represents blank spaces in the url. You can replace the blank spaces with "-". Google recommends hyphenated url's rather than blank spaces and underscores. The url's should be clean with every word seperated by "-" and the url size can be anywhere around 80 to 90 characters in length.

[Shakur]

Hi there!

Clean URLs are preferred by people, and it just so happens that search engines prefer them as well. Keywords in URLs are, more often than not, used to identify the relevance of a page when a search for a particular keyword is performed. However, it is not generally recommended to stuff keywords in your URLs for SEO purposes. The idea is to deliver enhanced usability to help users remember and share your URLs more easily. At the same time, clean URLs also facilitate a search engine’s ability to identify the relevance of page content to a particular search query, in order to choose what to display in search results.

So yes, it´s better if you modify all of them and make it clean.

Good luck

[IM_Learner]

Yes! As Suresh and Shakur said, that it is preferred by people and search engines. People have hard time reading the urls with special characters and a hyphen is recommended.

Regards

[kbates]

What if you have a client with a LOT of ugly URLs that need to be cleaned up?

The plan is to create 301 redirects for every page that we change. But, let's say we're talking about 50+ product pages.

In your opinion, is it a problem to make that many changes at once?
Would you paste them out?
If so, how many at a time?
Also, is it a problem to have that many 301's on your website?

Thank you!