Hyphen in URL
-
Hi,
I would like to know if the following statement holds true today or it doesn't matter whether we use hyphens or underscore
If you have a URL like keyword1_keyword2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for keyword1_keyword2 ( highly unlikely ) .
But If you have a URL like keyword1-keyword2, that page can be returned for the searches - keyword1,keyword2 and even “keyword1keyword2”
Thanks
-
Though I doubt your customers are going to be searching for you with an underscore.
-
me too, underscors look like spam
-
Plus it just looks better to the user. IMO. Cleaner.
-
correct
-
Thanks Alan.
But If you have a URL like keyword1-keyword2, that page can be returned for the searches - keyword1,keyword2 and even “keyword1keyword2”
Let's say url is www.example.com/seo-india
This page can be returned for seo, "seoindia", seo india, and even seo-india, but not for seo_india
Am i right ?
-
Yes it is true, well it is true that - is treated as a seperator, _ is not in google
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
-
Use existing page with bad URL or brand new URL?
Hello, We will be updating an existing page with more helpful information with the goal of reaching more potential customers through SEO and also attaching a SEM campaign to the specific landing page. The current URL of the page scores 25 on Page Authority, and has 2 links to it from blog articles (PA 35, 31). The current content needs to be rewritten to be more helpful and also needs some additional information. The downsides are that it has an "bad" URL- no target keyword and uses underscores. Which of the following choices would you make? 1. Update this old "bad" URL with new content. Benefit from the existing PA. -or- 2. Start with a new optimized URL, reusing some of the old content and utilizing a 301 redirect from the previous page? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | XLMarketing0 -
Canonical URLs in an eCommerce site
We have a website with 4 product categories (1. ice cream parlors, 2. frozen yogurt shops etc.). A few sub-categories (e.g. toppings, smoothies etc.) and the products contained in those are available in more than one product category (e.g. the smoothies are available in the "ice cream parlors" category, but also in the "frozen yogurt shops" category). My question: Unfortunately the website has been designed in a way that if a subcategory (e.g. smoothies) is available in more than 1 category, then itself (the subcategory page) + all its product pages will be automatically visible under various different urls. So now I have several urls for one and the same product: www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|FROZEN-YOGURT-SHOPS-391-2-5 and http://www.example.com/strawberry-smoothie|SMOOTHIES|ICE-CREAM-PARLORS-391-1-5 And also several ones for one and the same sub-category (they all include exactly the same set of products): http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-1-12-0-4 (the smoothies contained in the ice cream parlors category) http://www.example.com/SMOOTHIES-2-12-0-4 (the same smoothies, contained in the frozen yogurt shops category) This is happening with around 100 pages. I would add canonical tags to the duplicates, but I'm afraid that by doing so, the category (frozen yogurt shops) that contains several non-canonical sub-categories (smoothies, toppings etc.) , might not show up anymore in search results or become irrelevant for Google when searching for example for "products for frozen yoghurt shops". Do you know if this would be actually the case? I hope I explained it well..
Technical SEO | | Gabriele_Layoutweb0 -
Why are my URL's changing
My rankings suddenly dropped and when trying to understand why I realized that nearly all images in Google's cached version of my site were missing. In the actual site they appear but in the cached version they don't. I noticed that most of the images had a ?6b5830 at the end of the URL and these were the images that were not showing. I am hoping that I found the reason for the drop in rankings. Maybe since Google cannot see a lot of the content it decided not to rank it as well (particularly since it seems to happen on thousands of pages). This is a cached version of my site I am using the following plugins that might be causing it: Yoasts SEO plugin, W3 total cache. Does anyone know what is causing ?6b5830 to be added to the end of most of my URL's? Could this be the reason for the ranking drop? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JillB20130 -
URL query considered duplicate content?
I have a Magento site. In order to reduce duplicate content for products of the same style but with different colours I have combined them on to 1 product page. I would like to allow the pictures to be dynamic, i.e. allow a user to search for a colour and all the products that offer that colour appear in the results, but I dont want the default product image shown but the product image for that colour applying to the query. Therefore to do this I have to append a query string to the end of the URL to produce this result: www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red My question is, will the query variations then be picked up as duplicate content: www.website.com/category/product-name.html www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=red www.website.com/category/product-name.html?=yellow Google suggest it has contingencies in its algorithm and I will not be penalised: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2007/09/google-duplicate-content-caused-by-url.html But other sources suggest this is not accurate. Note the article was written in 2007.
Technical SEO | | BlazeSunglass0 -
Query strings in Canoncials URLs
Video on my site all resides at www.mydomain.com/video in a player that does not assign unique URLs for each video. We may be able to rewrite the URLs to include a unique identifier found in the video's metadata (www.mydomain.com/video/?bctid=17769780). If I did this, how would it impact the canonical URL? Do the SEs accept canonicals with query strings? What if I only changed the canonical URL and did not change the video's URL? Would that be a problem?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
URL Folders and Naming Convention Changes?
1. We’re looking for some clarification in regards to our URL structure. Currently, at our product level we have http://www.ties.com/v/a/elite-solid-black-black-tie however the parent URL is http://www.ties.com/black-ties. a. So here are the question. How much is this hurting because semantically the naming convention of this URL and weird and doesn’t follow logical patterns. In other words. Should the product page for this be http://ties.com/black-ties/elite-solid-black-tie. How bad is this hurting us? b. If we were to change the ULR structure, should we do it in phases or all at once? We don’t want to get penalized. We have well over 3,000 product pages.
Technical SEO | | Ties.com0 -
Cyrillic letter in URL - Encoding
Hi all We are launching our site in Russia. As far as I can see by searching Google all sites have URLs in latin letters. Is there a special reason for this? - It seems that cyrillic letters also work. My technical staff says that it might give some encoding problems. Can anyone give me some insight into this? Thanks in advance.. / Kenneth
Technical SEO | | Kennethskonto0 -
How does a sitemap affect the definition of canonical URLs?
We are having some difficulty generating a sitemap that includes our SEO-friendly URLs (the ones we want to set as canonical), and I was wondering if we might be able to simply use the non-SEO-friendly, non-canonical URLs that the sitemap generator has been producing and then use 301 redirects to send them to the canonical. Is there a reason why we should not be doing this? We don't want search engines to think that the sitemap URLs are more important than the pages to which they redirect. How important is it that the sitemap URLs match the canonical URLs? We would like to find a solution outside of the generation of the sitemap itself as we are locked into using a vendor’s product in order to generate the sitemap. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | emilyburns0