Should I replace underscores in page file names with hyphens?
-
Many of the 1000s of pages at our Web store that were established several years ago but still relevant today have underscores separating words in page file names. For example: http://www.audiobooksonline.com/whats_new_compact_disc_audiobooks_audio_books.html
Should I replace the underscores with hyphens like this:
http://www.audiobooksonline.com/whats-new-compact-disc-audiobooks-audio-books.html
or should I duplicate pages with underscores using hyphens and have the older pages with underscores 304 re-directed to the new pages with hyphens?
-
No worries. And, I agree with you on the drawbacks. I know I've made changes like this before and caused more problems than I think I had in the first place
-
Shoot, I just realized I linked to the same video. Thumbs up for that.
-
Hi Larry,
Truth be told - I would leave them alone.
It's true that Google treats underscores differently than dashes - or at least they did as recently as 2011. In this Webmaster Video, Matt Cutts explains that underscores act as a "joiner" - joining the two words together.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AQcSFsQyct8
But he also states that it's a minor effect, that's it's not worth changing if you don't have to.
I happen to agree with Matt on this. Changing your urls and/or redirecting them usually doesn't cause much problems, but in certain cases it can have a negative effect on your SEO, resulting in a loss of traffic and rankings. We generally advise folks not to change your URLs unless you have to - and in this case you don't have to.
CAVEAT: The only situation I would actually advise you to make this change is if you were overhauling your website/CMS and had to change your URL structure anyway. In this situation it would make sense, and you would want to redirect the old URLs via 301 to the new structure.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
Check out the attached video.
If it were me, I would look at the link profile of the pages that could potentially change and, assuming I didn't find something that told me to just keep it as is, I'd make the change and then 301 all of the underscored URLs to the rewritten URLs.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Domain Name redirection to new Domain Name - VS - Transfering Domaine Name from account 1 to account 2
Hi there! Thanks for your time 😉 I have a new cutsomer that bought his domain name via WIX and your know... WIX sucks huge time for SEO. Basically, we want to do SEO outside of WIX. But I am not sure HOW I should proceed. I think I have 2 options: OPTION 1- We transfer the domain name from WIX to a new hoster. But we will lose 7 days during that, lose prospects while the website is in maintenance and we might lose the little bit of ranking we have on the way. BUT! ONCE Everything is done with the transfer, we will be able to operate our SEO campaing with a Domain Name that as 15 domain authority, links, little bit a ranking, etc. OPTION 2- I just buy a new domain name. I build the new Website on it and then use the SEO juice from the old domain name with redirect to push the new domain name. Like this, I won't lose any opportunities. BUT I will have to restart the SEO as new... Any tips or ideas for me? Maybe there is an OPTION 3 that I don't know about.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gab-SEO1 -
Google disavow file
Does anybody have any idea how often Google reads the disavow file?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
New Web Page Not Indexed
Quick question with probably a straightforward answer... We created a new page on our site 4 days ago, it was in fact a mini-site page though I don't think that makes a difference... To date, the page is not indexed and when I use 'Fetch as Google' in WT I get a 'Not Found' fetch status... I have also used the'Submit URL' in WT which seemed to work ok... We have even resorted to 'pinging' using Pinglar and Ping-O-Matic though we have done this cautiously! I know social media is probably the answer but we have been trying to hold back on that tactic as the page relates to a product that hasn't quite launched yet and we do not want to cause any issues with the vendor! That said, I think we might have to look at sharing the page socially unless anyone has any other ideas? Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Page is noindex
Hi, We set pages with this and i can see in the view source of the page <meta name="robots" content="noindex"/> We had a new page posted in the site and its indexed by Google but now the new post is visible on a page thats shows partial data which we noindexed as above because its duplicate data and search engines dont have to see it But its still crawling Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Which index page should I canonical to?
Hello! I'm doing a routine clean up of my code and had a question about the canonical tag. On the index page, I have the following: I have never put any thought into which index path is the best to use. http://www.example.com http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/index.php Could someone shed some light on this for me? Does it make a difference? Thanks! Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ryan_Phillips1 -
Will pages irrelevant to a site's core content dilute SEO value of core pages?
We have a website with around 40 product pages. We also have around 300 pages with individual ingredients used for the products and on top of that we have some 400 pages of individual retailers which stock the products. Ingredient pages have same basic short info about the ingredients and the retail pages just have the retailer name, adress and content details. Question is, should I add noindex to all the ingredient and or retailer pages so that the focus is entirely on the product pages? Thanks for you help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ArchMedia0 -
What to do if the wrong page is ranking?
What to do if the wrong page of your website is ranking and you cannot 301 it? Apparently an outsourced company the previous manager hired build anchor text links to the homepage, when those links should have been pointing to a deeper page. As a result, the hompage is now ranking for that term. But I think we can convert a lot more of the visitors if the deeper page is there instead. Obviously, I can't 301 the homepage. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrep0 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0