URL contains whitespace
This means that the URL in question contains whitespace characters in the path.
URLs with whitespace characters are not recommended as they could cause issues when site visitors share or link to the URL, potentially leading to broken links and a loss of potential link equity.
Why is this important?
Whitespace characters in URLs are considered unsafe, so most modern CMS platforms will not generate URLs with whitespaces.
Through encoding (either as "%20" or "+"), you can make these URLs machine-readable, but from an SEO perspective they are risky as they could cause issues when site visitors share or link to the URL, potentially leading to broken links and a loss of potential link equity.
What does the Hint check?
This Hint will trigger for any internal URL which contains at least one whitespace character.
Examples that trigger this Hint
The Hint will trigger for any URL that include the space character, or either encoding, "+" or "%20":
- https://sitebulb.com/folder path/page.html
- https://sitebulb.com/folder+path/page.html
- https://sitebulb.com/folder%20path/page.html
How do you resolve this issue?
Our recommendation is to avoid using spaces in URLs, and instead use hyphens to separate words. If you are unable to do this, make sure to encode whitespace using "+" or "%20" in the query-string, and using "%20" within the rest of the URL.