Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How many hyphens are allowed in page titles or image names?
-
When I was going through certification, I was told it should be limited to one or two. I was curious if there is a change.
-
Hi KP
There really is no limit but URL's with many hyphens tend to look spammy.
Remember the old days of long partial match URLs? www.cheap-car-insurance-for-u.com? and suchlike? They just look really crappy. If you really must use one in the TLD then limit it to one.
For Pages & Posts, it's quite common to see more use of hyphens. I'm editor at a music blog and it's quite common to see for example:
sitename.com/the-rolling-stones-manchester-live-review It looks natural even though there is a stop word in the URL because 'The' is actually part of the Stones' name
You will get a warning in Moz because of the long URL but it will not stop it ranking well, at all!
For images, it depends on how descriptive you want it to be. If the image was of Mick Jagger in Manchester then the image URL could easily be sitename**/mick-jagger-manchester-old-trafford** and then the Title or Alt text tag would be 'Mick Jagger - Manchester - Old Trafford, so highly descriptive with a couple of hyphens and great for image SEO.
So it's up to you really - the more descriptive the better. Ignore warnings of long URLs unless they are stupidly long and focus on enhancing the ranking of the page rather than worry about minutiae.
Now:
If you are talking about Meta Titles then it's common to use a variety of separators such as a hyphen (-) or a bar (|). In that case, it's fairly simple as you need Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword - Sitename so they are often limited to just two.
I think the more you use them the less space there is for Keywords and it's important with a limited length (60-70 characters) to get those in as a priority. The hyphen takes up 3 characters so they are largely a waste of space.
I hope that helps
Regards Nigel
-
Hello there,
If you're talking about the name of image files such as jpg and png where hyphens are used as space (just like you did on page url), there's really no limit given by Google, so my advice would be not to over optimize those image files by stuffing your keywords in it (ie, keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4.jpg), just make it natural (puppy-food.jpg) instead.
As for Page Titles like Gaston suggested to use it as a separator (personally I prefer | or : ), and again there's no actual limit given by Google, but the key here is to make sure these are optimized for your visitor then only Google. Just make sure they're natural then you should be fine.
Hope this helps,
Joseph Yap
-
Hi there!
There is no such restriction on the amount of hyphens. Usually there are one or two, used as separators in titles. Never seen them in image titles.
Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.
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
-
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Snippet showing as domain name with apostrophe, instead of page title when searching for the domain name.
Hi, We have an issue with one of our websites, with the snippet dispaying differently in Google serps when searching for the domain or the website name rather than a search term. When searching for a search term, the page title shows as expected, but when searching for the site by the domain name either with or without the tld, it shows the snippet as the domain name with an apostrophe at the end. Domain is subli.co.uk Thanks in advance for any advice!
On-Page Optimization | | K3v1n0 -
Duplicate page titles and Content in Woocommerce
Hi Guys, I'm new to Moz and really liking it so far!
On-Page Optimization | | jeeyer
I run a eCommerce site on Wordpress + WooCommerce and ofcourse use Yoast for SEO optimalisation I've got a question about my first Crawl report which showed over 600 issues! 😐 I've read that this is something that happens more often (http://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success). Most of them are categorized under:
1. Duplicate Page Titles or;
2. Duplicate Page Content. Duplicate Page Titles:
These are almost only: product category pages and product tags. Is this problem beeing solved by giving them the right SEO SERP? I see that a lot of categories don't have a proper SEO SERP set up in yoast! Do I need to add this to clear this issue, or do I need to change the actual Title? And how about the Product tags? Another point (bit more off-topic) I've read here: http://moz.com/community/q/yoast-seo-plugin-to-index-or-not-to-index-categories that it's advised to noindex/follow Categories and Tags but isn't that a wierd idea to do for a eCommerce site?! Duplicate Page Content:
Same goes here almost only Product Categories and product tags that are displayed as duplicate Page content! When I check the results I can click on a blue button for example "+ 17 duplicates" and that shows me (in this case 17 URLS) but they are not related to the fist in any way so not sure where to start here? Thanks for taking the time to help out!
Joost0 -
How to Handle duplicate pages/titles in Wordpress
The wordpress blog causes problems with page titles. If you go to the second page of blog posts it there's a different URL but with the same page title. for example: page 1: site/blog page 2: site/blog/page/2 Each page gets flagged for duplicate page titles. Thanks in advance for your thoughts,
On-Page Optimization | | heymarshall1 -
Why is my contact us page ranking higher than my home page?
Hello, It doesn't matter what keyword I put into Google (when I'm not signed in and have cleaned down my browsing history) the contact us page ranks higher than the home page. I'm not sure why this is, the home page has a higher page authority, more links and more social media shares, the website is an established one. When I have checked Google Analytics my home page gets more people landing on it than the contact us page. It looks like people are ignoring the contact us page and scrolling down until they find the home page. I'd appreciate any help or advice you might have. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | mblsolutions2 -
How important are image file names
Hi, How important do you think the image file names are for image search?
On-Page Optimization | | jjtech
I know it used to be the best practice a while ago but is it still important? Thanks in advance, JJ0 -
How many keywords max can I optimize each page for?
I don't want to over optimize by doing 1 keyword per 1 page, but then if I do more, seomoz on-page tool report doesn't give an A grade for each keyword I optimize. I usually optimize for max 3 keywords that are very closely related, meaning they use the same words. Ex. dentist los angeles, los angeles dentist, dentist in los angeles Am I on the right track or what's your recommendation? Should I create different landing pages for each keyword?
On-Page Optimization | | sub90900