Replacing "_" with "-" in url, results in new url?
-
We ran SEOmoz's "On-Page Optimization" tool on a url which contains the character "_".
According to the tool:
"Characters which are less commonly used in URLs may cause problems with accessibility, interpretation and ranking in search engines. It is considered a best practice to stick to standard URL structures to avoid potential problems."
"Rewrite the URL to contain only standard characters."
Therefore we will rewrite the url, replacing "_" with "-".
Will search engines consider the "-" url a different one? Do we need to 301 the old url to the new one?
Thanks for your help!
-
One reason to change all URLs from _ to - is conformity.
If you have some that are _ and some that are -
the question is how will you remember which one to use, for a particular page?
For that reason, I would convert them all.
As for using a canonical tag, I don't know, you'd need to know what google and otehr search engines do with that information, if anything. I would also worry about what they will do with it in the future, because these things are liable to change.
If it was me, I would change them all and redirect the stragglers.
-
Why not use rel canonical? I would prefer that to a 301 (my 2nd choice)
-
To throw in my 2 cents, the benefit in rewriting the URL (and making a 301) comes from Google's ability to then clearly recognize the keywords that you're using within it (assuming that you're synching your on page KWs). Google views hot_keyword_landing_page.html as hotkeywordlandingpage.html - Matt Cutts on underscores vs. dashes in URLs. The downside is having to keep the 301 in place if the page has IBLs.
-
Yes it will. Had to re-write a few items myself and any little change will make a new URL.
301 it is best.
-
FYI, based on the information provided by the SEOmoz tool we will revamp the page (tags, look, content), therefore it'll be a "new page".
-
As stated before, the answer is Yes. Should you do it ? I would answer no.
You should do it for new content, but do move all you're content to other URL and 301 just for this. This would no do too much good.
-
Well this is an easy one.
_Will search engines consider the "-" url a different one? _Yes.
Do we need to 301 the old url to the new one? Yes.
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
-
How would you improve our URL structure?
Hi Mozzers, I have a question about the URL structure on our website (www.ikwilzitzakken.nl). We now have a main category with "zitzakken" (beanbags). We also have different brands, types and colours. Now we have URL's like this: <a>https://www.ikwilzitzakken.nl/zitzakken/vetsak/vetsak-fs600-flokati-zitzak/_381_w_3544_3862_NL_1</a> which seems long and not clean. Please don't look at the query at the end, we can't do anything about that in our CMS. In english this would be: https://www.iwantbeanbags.nl/beanbags/vetsak/vetsak-fs600-flokati-beanbag/_381_w_3544_3862_NL_1 How would you optimise this? We do have good rankings (this one ranks #1 for example), but I think our overall structure could be way better. Would love your thoughts about this.
On-Page Optimization | | TheOnlineWarp0 -
Missing new pages in Search
Hi, We are on wordpress platform with category permalink structure site.com/category/categoryname. To pull in more SEO traffic, we created pages with structure site.com/categorynameand pulled in all the content from category pages to these new pages followed by applying no-follow on category pages within robots.txt. While it has been a week we applied these changes, we still see old category pages on google search with weird description ( A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt... ) How could we make search results to replace old categories links with the new pages? thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
SEO for New Magento Site??!?
Hi All, We have had a new site delivered by our developers (hurrah...the old one was to terrible for words) but we seem to be having a lot of issues with the new Magento platform. What they have done is used the community version and tried to customize it. I came on to this project about a month into the build and although Magento does seem to do a lot things well there do seem to be some problems. From an SEO prespective we have seen some increase on some search terms and a drop of in others. I would be interested in hearing from other Magento users about their experiences with this platform and any ideas on how to crank up the activity. Our site is at www.nationwidepharmacies.co.uk . There are few odd bits including the side navigation which seems to be very clunky and not overly customizable in this version. Any useful criticism would also be well received. Look forward to hearing Nic
On-Page Optimization | | nicc19760 -
Temp redirects of homepage URLs
Working on a site for a client and the CMS provider has all variants of their domain (.co.uk & .com and / and http:// etc) temp redirecting to the /default.aspx homepage. I know in theory that this means no Google Juice is being passed to the final location page, does this mean that all backlinks that point to their domain are not actually passing Juice onto the homepage? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Switch_Digital0 -
Does Google pick up on words such as "in", "the", "and" etc?
If I have in my meta-title e.g Holidays Ireland, but i have in my description for grammer purposes Holidays in Ireland will google see these as 2 separate keywords and will SEOMoz grade me lower for doing this? Or is holidays Ireland included in Holidays in Ireland because google doesnt pick up on "in" ?? I would appreciate your help on this.
On-Page Optimization | | Louise990 -
Maximum length of a URL for good SEO?
Hi there, We have a content database as part of our site and I noticed that the way the database is loaded with new content, it means that the URL’s for these pages are really long, around 100 characters or sometimes more http://www.xxxyy.org/knowledge-base/documents/word1-word2-word3-word4-word5-word6-word7-word8 Is there a suggted maximum character length for a URL? Kind of like for title tag where I max out at 69… Should I truncate the URL’s or at least reduce the numbers of words in them to something less spammy? Does that make a difference? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0 -
Product sorting and dynamic urls
On our weekly SEOmoz crawls, we get thousands of warnings about overly dynamic URLs as a result of our product sorting options at the top of our category pages. It seems like the ability to sort products by price, name, etc., is nice for the customer. For SEO is this really a problem or can we ignore these warnings?
On-Page Optimization | | teatable0 -
Rel="canonical"
Can you tell me if we've implemented rel="canonical" properly? We want this to be our primary: http://www.autopartstomorrow.com/parts/6052317-r-econ-semi-met-brake-pads- while this would be duplicate and refer robots back to the URL above: http://www.autopartstomorrow.com/parts/6054284 We've added the following to both pages: <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.autopartstomorrow.com/parts/6052317-r-econ-semi-met-brake-pads- "/> Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | jonesatl0