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 important is it to add hyphens between words in URL Permalink Structure?
-
We have an issue with our URL Permalink Structures for dynamically generated pages on our website. As we generated hundreds of pages, it does not automatically Space the Words in the Permalink Structure .
For example, if we have a product name Under Armour Fire Basketball Shoe , it will show up in the url as:
"mywebsite.com/underarmourfire-basketballshoe"
vs
"mywebsite.com/under-armour-fire-basketball-shoe"
How important is it that the URL includes these spaces between each word in the permalink?
-
Hi Aspirant. these hyphens assume a significant job with regards to rank that particular watchword prefers in the event that you do it as such 'nderarmourfire-basketball shoe' google will search for basketball shoe catchphrase to rank rather than basketball shoes. Much the same as you see here best boxing gloves kept all the permalinks with hyphens and they are positioning. SO I will propose you to do something very similar to your site in the event that you need to up your positioning.
On the off chance that you need further recommendations, you are welcome!
-
Hello Aspirant. these hyphens play a very important role when it comes to rank that specific keyword like if you do it this way 'nderarmourfire-basketballshoe' google will look for basketballshoe keyword to rank instead of basketballshoes. Just like you see here best boxing gloves kept all the permalinks with hyphens and they are ranking. SO I will suggest you to do the same thing with your site if you want to up your ranking.
If you need any more suggestions, you are welcome!
-
It is best practice to separate all words with dashes but it's not going to make or break your rankings.
The search engines are smart enough now to decipher that underarmourfire-basketballshoe is really "under armour fire basketball shoes". Just type in the former into Google and you'll see that Google asks if you meant the latter.
Also, you can find hundreds of examples of "messy" URLs that rank top ten proving that that one factor alone isn't going to make or break your success.
If it's a simple fix for a programmer to make it so your URL's use dashes between all words then I'd say fix the problem. But if it's a big deal that would take a lot of time/resources, the argument could easily be made to pass on this issue for the time being to knock out other more important items.
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
-
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
Looking to remove dates from URL permalink structure. What do you think of this idea?
I know most people who remove dates from their URL structure usually do so and then setup a 301 redirect. I believe that's the right way to go about this typically. My biggest fear with doing a global 301 redirect implementation like that across an entire site is that I've seen cases where this has sort of shocked Google and the site took a hit in organic traffic pretty bad. Heres what I'm thinking a safer approach would be and I'd like to hear others thoughts. What if... Changed permalink structure moving forward to remove the date in future posts. All current URLs stay as is with their dates Moving forward we would go back and optimize past posts in waves (including proper 301 redirects and better URL structure). This way we avoid potentially shocking Google with a global change across all URLs. Do you know of a way this is possible with a large Wordpress website? Do you see any conplications that could come about in this process? I'd like to hear any other thoughts about this please. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HashtagJeff0 -
Inactive Products - Inactive URLs
Hi, In our website www.viatrading.com we have many products that might be in stock or not depending on availability. Until now, when a product was not available anymore, we took this page down (and redirected to its product category page). And, only if the product was available again, we re-activated the URL - this might be days, months or even years later. To make this more SEO-friendly, we decided now that while a product is not available, instead or deactivating/redirecting the page, we will leave it online and just add a message saying "This product is currently not available". If we do this, we will automatically re-activate about 500 products pages at once. 1. Just to make sure, is it harmful for SEO to keep activating/deactivating URLs this way? 2. Since most of these pages have been deindexed for a long time due to being redirected - have they lost all their SEO juice? 3. How can we better activate these old 500 pages - is it ok activating them all at once? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | viatrading11 -
Best-practice URL structures with multiple filter combinations
Hello, We're putting together a large piece of content that will have some interactive filtering elements. There are two types of filters, topics and object types. The architecture under the hood constrains us so that everything needs to be in URL parameters. If someone selects a single filter, this can look pretty clean: www.domain.com/project?topic=firstTopic
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalcrc
or
www.domain.com/project?object=typeOne The problems arise when people select multiple topics, potentially across two different filter types: www.domain.com/project?topic=firstTopic-secondTopic-thirdTopic&object=typeOne-typeTwo I've raised concerns around the structure in general, but it seems to be too late at this point so now I'm scratching my head thinking of how best to get these indexed. I have two main concerns: A ton of near-duplicate content and hundreds of URLs being created and indexed with various filter combinations added Over-reacting to the first point above and over-canonicalizing/no-indexing combination pages to the detriment of the content as a whole Would the best approach be to index each single topic filter individually, and canonicalize any combinations to the 'view all' page? I don't have much experience with e-commerce SEO (which this problem seems to have the most in common with) so any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!0 -
Structured Data + Meta Descriptions
Hey All, Was just looking through some google pages on best practices for meta descriptions and came across this little tidbit. "Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book. " This is the first time I have seen suggested use of structured data in meta descriptions. Does this totally replace a regular meta description or will it work in conjunction with the regular meta description? If I provide both structured data and text, will the SERP display text and the structured data the way it was previously displayed? Or will the 150 -160 character limit take precedence and just cut off all info after that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Whebb0 -
Using WP All Import csv import plugin for wordpress to daily update products on large ecommerce site. Category naming and other issues.
We have just got an automated solution working to upload about 4000 products daily to our site. We get a CSV file from the wholesalers server each day and the way they have named products and categories is not ideal. Although most of the products remain the same (don't need to be over written) Some will go out of stock or prices may change etc. Problem is we have no control over the csv file so we need to keep the catagories they have given us. Might be able to create new catgories and have products listed under multiple categories? If anyone has used wp all import or has knoledge in this area please let me know. I have plenty more questions but this should start the ball rolling! Thanks in advance mozzers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weebro0 -
How important is the number of indexed pages?
I'm considering making a change to using AJAX filtered navigation on my e-commerce site. If I do this, the user experience will be significantly improved but the number of pages that Google finds on my site will go down significantly (in the 10,000's). It feels to me like our filtered navigation has grown out of control and we spend too much time worrying about the url structure of it - in some ways it's paralyzing us. I'd like to be able to focus on pages that matter (explicit Category and Sub-Category) pages and then just let ajax take care of filtering products below these levels. For customer usability this is smart. From the perspective of manageable code and long term design this also seems very smart -we can't continue to worry so much about filtered navigation. My concern is that losing so many indexed pages will have a large negative effect (however, we will reduce duplicate content and be able provide much better category and sub-category pages). We probably should have thought about this a year ago before Google indexed everything :-). Does anybody have any experience with this or insight on what to do? Thanks, -Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cre80 -
Add Videos Above or Below the Fold?
We are considering adding videos to thousands of article pages, and were wondering if it would be better to add video above or below the fold? They take up quite a bit of space, and push the article content below the fold--would this hurt us?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0