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.
Approved Word Separators in URLs
-
Hi There,
We are in the process of revamping our URL structure and my devs tell me they have a technical problem using a hyphen as a word separator. There's a whole lot of competing recommendations out there and at this point I'm just confused.
Does anyone have any idea what character would be next-best to the hyphen for separating words in a URL? Any reason to prefer one over another?
Some links I've found discussing the topic:
- This page says that "__Google has confirmed that the point (.), the comma (,) and the hyphen (-) are valid word separators in URL’s.": http://www.internetofficer.com/seo/google-word-separator/
- This page suggests the plus (+) symbol would be best: http://labs.phurix.net/posts/word-separators-in-urls
- This guy says he's tested and there's a whole bunch of symbols that will work as word separators: http://www.webproguide.com/articles/Symbols-as-word-separators-a-look-inside-the-search-engine-logic/
I'm leaning towards the tilde (~) or the plus (+) sign. Usage would be like so: http://www.domain.com/shop/sterling~silver OR /shop/sterling+silver etc...
Thanks in advance for your help!
-
Hey Jonaz, use the plus (+) sign. I think it's your best bet.
-
Hi All,
Anyone got a definitive answer on this one? I wish I could use dashes but can't. Any more advice on this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
-
Hi jonaz, I think I was editing my post when you were replying. Dashes are best, yes. I'd say underscores would be second-best. If your developers can't work with dashes, then my suggestion would be to use underscores.
Using a plus sign (+) isn't bad. The plus sign represents a space character I believe.
-
Hey George,
Problem is that I can't use hyphens (-) and need an alternative... Unless you mean dashes like mdash and ndash? (i.e. – and —) Wasn't sure if those characters were okay for URLs and whether they are recognized as separators by google...
-
Hello jonaz,
Here's the short answer: dashes are best.
Next best might be underscores.
For the long answer, check this post out: http://www.seomoz.org/q/hyphens-v...
Hope this helps!
-
The joys.... good luck!
-
Thanks, Davinia. Didn't want to introduce too much complexity to the problem but the issue is that our devs already have a series of rules in place where the hyphen carries special meaning, so I'm gonna have to work under those constraints...
-
I haven't come across this issue before so can't comment on which alternative but I'd be looking for Google's best practice and select one from there (from Google dev website or perhaps Matt Cutts has covered this in a video).
It seems interesting that your dev team could use an alternative like ~ or + but not (-) a hyphen. Maybe push back for the use of a hyphen!
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
-
Google is indexing bad URLS
Hi All, The site I am working on is built on Wordpress. The plugin Revolution Slider was downloaded. While no longer utilized, it still remained on the site for some time. This plugin began creating hundreds of URLs containing nothing but code on the page. I noticed these URLs were being indexed by Google. The URLs follow the structure: www.mysite.com/wp-content/uploads/revslider/templates/this-part-changes/ I have done the following to prevent these URLs from being created & indexed: 1. Added a directive in my Htaccess to 404 all of these URLs 2. Blocked /wp-content/uploads/revslider/ in my robots.txt 3. Manually de-inedex each URL using the GSC tool 4. Deleted the plugin However, new URLs still appear in Google's index, despite being blocked by robots.txt and resolving to a 404. Can anyone suggest any next steps? I Thanks!
Technical SEO | Nov 29, 2018, 10:36 AM | Tom3_150 -
Same URL for languages sub-directories
Hi All, I have a main domain and 9 different subdirectories for languages, example: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page-uk.html www.example.com/es/page-es.html we are implementing hreflang tags for the languages, but we are thinking to get rid of the dashes on the languages URL: -uk or -es, so it will be: www.example.com/page.html www.example.com/uk/page.html www.example.com/es/page.hrml would this be a problem? to have same page names even if they are in different subdirectories? would we need to add canonical tags, at lease for the main domain URLs? www.kornferry.com/page.html Thank you, Rachel
Technical SEO | Sep 17, 2018, 5:25 AM | RaquelSaiz0 -
Reviews on Product Page or Separated
Good Afternoon We currently have our individual product information pages set-up with a link through to a separate review page optimised for the term "Product A Reviews" I was reading about structured data and if I read correctly, the reviews should sit with the marked up product data so I was wondering whether to merge them back into one page. We have many reviews so the review pages are paginated in blocks of 25 My options are: Leave as it is, product info page and separate review page Merge the review content back in to the main page and have the pagination work on that page Include the first 25 reviews on the product info page then when user clicks through to page 2, 3 etc they're taken to the separated review page. In that way the product page would regularly get new content and we can still have a page specifically targeted for reviews. From the users point of view, they probably aren't even aware they're being taken to a separate reviews page so with that in mind as I'm typing this maybe they should be one page again
Technical SEO | Jun 20, 2017, 5:07 PM | Ham19790 -
Should the date be included in news URLs
My website is not a news or magazine site, but we do have a news section updated 2-3 times a week with industry related news. We are working on a new structure for the URLs.
Technical SEO | Jul 29, 2013, 8:22 AM | theLotter
Should the date be included in the URL? From this article from Google I understand that as long as we submit a news sitemap it doesnt matter whether or not numbers are included in the URL, correct? https://support.google.com/news/publisher/answer/68323?topic=116650 -
Double Slash // in URL
My client is using double forward slahes in URL like this "//" is this affecting SEO?
Technical SEO | Feb 26, 2013, 2:22 PM | yanaiguana1110 -
Old URL redirect to New URL
Alright I did something dumb a year a go and I'm still paying for it. I changed my hyphenated URL to the non-hyphenated version when I redesigned my website. I say it was dumb because I lost most of my link juice even though I did 301 redirects (via the htaccess file) for almost all of the pages I could find in Google's index. Here's my problem. My new site took a huge hit in traffic (down 60%) when I made the change and even though I've done thousands of redirects my old site is still showing up in the SERPS and send much if not most of my traffic. I don't want to take the old site down in fear it will kill all of my traffic. What should I do? Is there a better method I should explore then 301 redirects? Could the other site be affecting my current rank since it's still there? (FYI...both sites are built on the WP platform). Any help or ideas are greatly appreciated. Thank you! Joe
Technical SEO | Mar 14, 2012, 7:56 PM | kaje0 -
Someone is redirecting their url to mine
Hello, I have just discovered that a company in Poland www.realpilot.pl is directing their domain to ours www.transair.co.uk. We have not authorised this, neither do we want this. I have contacted the company and the webmaster to get it removed. If you search for the domain name www.realpilot.pl we (www.transair.co.uk) come up top. My biggest worry is that we will get penalised by Google for this re-direct as it appears to be done using some kind of frame. Does anyone know anything about this kind of thing? Many Thanks Rob Martin
Technical SEO | Sep 16, 2011, 3:34 PM | brightonseorob0 -
Why google index my IP URL
hi guys, a question please. if site:112.65.247.14 , you can see google index our website IP address, this could duplicate with our darwinmarketing.com content pages. i am not quite sure why google index my IP pages while index domain pages, i understand this could because of backlink, internal link and etc, but i don't see obvious issues there, also i have submit request to google team to remove ip address index, but seems no luck. Please do you have any other suggestion on this? i was trying to do change of address setting in Google Webmaster Tools, but didn't allow as it said "Restricted to root level domains only", any ideas? Thank you! boson
Technical SEO | Apr 23, 2011, 2:37 AM | DarwinChinaSEO0