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
-
URL structure with dash or slash
Hi, everyone Basically I am editing my website page's URL for SEO Optimisation and I am not sure which URL structure is best for SEO. The main different is the sign ( dash or slash ) before the product-code. HERE ARE TWO EXAMPLE www.example.com/long-tail-keyword-product-code www.example.com/long-tail-keyword/product-code To get more idea of my page, here is one of the product from my website : http://www.okeus.co.uk/pro_view-3.html My website is selling my own product, as a result the only keyword can be found was the name of the product and I separated different design by different code. Any experts who are willing help would be very much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chrisyu781 -
Does rewriting a URL affect the page authority?
Hi all, I recently optimized an overview page for a car rental website. Because the page didn’t rank very well, I rewrote the URL, putting the exact keyword combination in it. Then I asked Google to re-crawl the URL through Search Console. This afternoon, I checked Open Site Explorer and saw that the Page Authority had decreased to 1, while the subpages still have an authority of about 18-20. Hence my question: is rewriting a URL a bad idea for SEO? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiseDE
Lise0 -
How and When Should I use Canonical Url Tags?
Pretty new to the SEO universe. But I have not used any canonical tags, just because there is not definitive source explaining exactly when and why you should use them??? Am I the only one who feels this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenrushdaily0 -
URL Formatting - Magento
Hi, We are working with a client on Mangento who URLs are formatting Google friendly eg; productname.html - as seen in site search in Google) but when you click the link to the site it is adding on #.VEWKQxbc754 (or similar) The site is also having some page indexing problems as well Thoughts? specific settings/Add on in magento?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pure-SEO0 -
Weird indexing problem - Can it be solved?
Hi Been building and optimising sites for 15 years and this is one of the hardest problems I ever came across. So any help would be very much appreciated. Here we go: For some mysterious reason this URL http://weekend.visitsweden.com/no/ has been indexed as http://weekend.visitsweden.com even if we tried all we can to correct it. The problem is that since the latter points to the first URL with a 301 it refuses to get any page rank. Also it does not get visible in Google at all. Just a recap of what we have tried so far: Add site to webmaster tools Add proper sitemap.xml Add 301 redirect to the correct URL An easy way to locate the problem is to search for the main content of the site. As you can see it returns the wrong URL and the correct URL does not even get listed. Again, any help is very much appreciated. Kind regards Fredrik
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Resultify0 -
Is slugs in the URL now a good thing?
Hi, Until now I've adviced a lot of web shops to avoid having long URL structures for their categories and products (aka. remove the useless slugs). Recently I discovered that Google started rolling out more and more results that looks like these screenshots: http://filer.crenia.no/McDn & http://filer.crenia.no/McYO (look at the URL in the SERP) I'm assuming the slugs are a vital part of creating these SERP results. Personally, I also think they look better and favor them compared to the old SERPs. Does anyone have any experience with these, what impact they have or any reason not to add slugs to URLs again?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Inevo0 -
Pretty URLs... do they matter?
Given the following urls: example.com/warriors/ninjas/ example.com/warriors/ninjas/cid=WRS-NIN01 Is there any difference from an SEO perspective? Aesthetically the 2nd bugs me but that's not a statistical difference. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nymbot0 -
How to fix issues regarding URL parameters?
Today, I was reading help article for URL parameters by Google. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1235687 I come to know that, Google is giving value to URLs which ave parameters that change or determine the content of a page. There are too many pages in my website with similar value for Name, Price and Number of product. But, I have restricted all pages by Robots.txt with following syntax. URLs:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=name
http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?dir=asc&order=price
http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?limit=100 Syntax in Robots.txt
Disallow: /?dir=
Disallow: /?p=
Disallow: /*?limit= Now, I am confuse. Which is best solution to get maximum benefits in SEO?0