In Report Card - Weird Characters in URL
-
We have an underscore in a lot of our links. My question is since it is difficult to change existing site architecture, is an underscore really that negative?
Here is an example:
http://www.winematch.com/profile_368-2005-Artesa-Vineyards--Winery-Merlot-Reserve.html
Eventually we want to change this to
http://www.winematch.com/wine/2005-Artesa-Vineyards-Winery-Merlot-Reserve.html
but it is a big project.
-
We built everything custom in php.
The second link I posted uses another directory "/wine/" which doesn't exist yet. That is the direction we'd like to go eventually where it would not have an underscore anymore. We would use mod_rewrite to do this.
You probably selected the second link which doesn't exist yet if you couldn't access our site.
Thanks for your response,
-tom
-
Hi Thomas!
It depends on your server configuration and what software you are using.
An underscore isn't negative. At one point Matt Cutts recommended using dashes (-) as a delimiter, but that was many years ago and he has since said that Google is smart enough to figure out what delimiters you are using.
I find that there are diehard fans of specific delimiters, which I think is silly. I myself prefer the dash, but again that's just personal preference.
The more concerning matter is that you have no sense of hierarchy in your URL. I'm assuming you are running an old version of osCommerce or something similar (your website won't load for me). I don't have much experience in osCommerce but I do remember that their permalink structure was horribly limiting back in the day. Not sure how plausible it would be to change your structure, but a quick Google search for your version number should return an answer rather quickly.
Also, both of your links are the same. I think you meant for the second one to be different
Would be glad to help out further if you can supply more information. Cheers!
P.S. - I'm biased toward Magento, but they have a free Community Edition you can check out if you want an eCommerce solution that isn't antiquated.
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
-
When I crawl my website I have urls with (#!162738372878) at the end of my urls
When I crawl my website I have urls with (#!162738372878) at the end of my urls. I used screaming frog to look check my website and I seen these. My normal urls are in there too, but each of them have a copy with this strange symbol and number at the end. I used a website builder called homestead to make the website and I seen a bunch of there urls in my crawl as well - http://editor.homestead.com/faq is an example I recently created a new website with their new website builder and transferred it to my old domain. However, I didnt know they didnt offer 301 redirects or canonical tags(learned about those afterwards) and I changed my page names. So they recommended I leave the old website published along with the new website. So if I search my website name on google, sometimes both will show in the results. I just want to sort this all out somehow. My website is www.coastlinetvinstalls.com Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Matt160 -
Changing existing URL to boost SEO
What's best practice regarding changing URLs for SEO? If the page contains great information around a particular term but the URL is not reflective of this and thus the page isn't ranking should the URL be changed? Or is it always a hard and fast no? It would seem to make sense to me if the page didn't have any backlinks already and Organic clicks were minimal. Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Samsam00000 -
International Country URL Structure
Hey Guys, We have a www.site.com (gTLD) site, the primary market in Australia. We want to expand to US and UK. For the homepage, we are looking to create 3 new subfolders which are: site.com/au/ site.com/uk/ site.com/us/ Then if someone visits the site.com redirect based on their ip address to to the correct location. We are also looking to setup hreflang tags between the 3 sub-folders and set geo-location targeting in google search console at sub-folder level. Just wondering if this setup sounds ok for international SEO? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pladcarl90 -
URL in russian
Hi everyone, I am doing an audit of a site that currently have a lot of 500 errors due to the russian langage. Basically, all the url's look that way for every page in russian: http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/food-packaging-machines/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alexrbrg
http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/wood-flour-solutions/
http://www.exemple.com/ru-kg/pешения-для/cellulose-solutions/ I am wondering if this error is really caused by the server or if Google have difficulty reading the russian langage in URL's. Is it better to have the URL's only in english ?0 -
How to deal with URLs and tabbed content
Hi All, We're currently redesigning a website for a new home developer and we're trying to figure out the best way to deal with tabbed content in the URL structure. The design of the site at the moment will have a page for a development and within that you can select your house type, then when on the house type page there will be tabs displayed for the user to see things like the plot map, availability and pricing, specifications, etc. The way our development team are looking at handling this is for the URL to use a hashtag or a query string at the end of it so we can still land users on these specific tabs for PPC for example. My question is really, has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations on how to best display the urls for SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Is it a problem if a URL has too many backslashes in its address?
The ecommerce platform of the site that I am working on generates URLs that contain ID Codes for each different product category, color variations, styles, etc. An example of a URL for a specific product includes: www.example.com/women/denim-jeans/py/c/109/np/108/p/3834.html Is it a problem for search engine crawlers if the URL address has so many backslashes in its address? Appreciate your feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO_Promenade0 -
Urls missing from product_cat sitemap
I'm using Yoast SEO plugin to generate XML sitemaps on my e-commerce site (woocommerce). I recently changed the category structure and now only 25 of about 75 product categories are included. Is there a way to manually include urls or what is the best way to have them all indexed in the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kisen0 -
Best practice to change the URL of all my site pages
Hi, I need to change all my site pages URL as a result of moving the site into another CMS platform that has its own URL structure: Currently the site is highly ranked for all relevant KWs I am targeting. All pages have backlinks Content and meta data should remain exactly the same. The domain should stay the same The plan is as follow: Set up the new site using a temporary domain name Copy over all content and meta data Set up all redirects (301) Update the domain name and point the live domain to the new one Watch closely for 404 errors and add any missing redirects Questions: Any comments on the plan? Is there a way (the above plan or any other) to make sure ranking will not be hurt What entries should I add to the sitemap.xml: new pages only or new pages and the pages from the old site? Thanks, Guy.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jid1