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.
Removing dashes in our URLs?
-
Hi Forum,
Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page.
Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly)
Thanks for your input.
-
I would dich the module and get one that works
-
But the URL is just a small factor in the greater scheme of things, and for humans, having a readable title tag would influence the CTR so much more than the URL missing a dash.
-
It shouldn't; search engines can isolate strings without separators. However, how many people do you think actually type 'girls pink yoga capri' or are you just being hypothetical?
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 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 -
Image URLs - best practice
Hi - I'm assuming image URL best practice follows same principles as non image URLs (not too many files and so on) - I notice alot of web devs putting photos in subdomains, so wonder if I'm missing something (I usually avoid subdomains like the plague)!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart1 -
Removing duplicate content
Due to URL changes and parameters on our ecommerce sites, we have a massive amount of duplicate pages indexed by google, sometimes up to 5 duplicate pages with different URLs. 1. We've instituted canonical tags site wide. 2. We are using the parameters function in Webmaster Tools. 3. We are using 301 redirects on all of the obsolete URLs 4. I have had many of the pages fetched so that Google can see and index the 301s and canonicals. 5. I created HTML sitemaps with the duplicate URLs, and had Google fetch and index the sitemap so that the dupes would get crawled and deindexed. None of these seems to be terribly effective. Google is indexing pages with parameters in spite of the parameter (clicksource) being called out in GWT. Pages with obsolete URLs are indexed in spite of them having 301 redirects. Google also appears to be ignoring many of our canonical tags as well, despite the pages being identical. Any ideas on how to clean up the mess?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMHC0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Any SEO Penalties from Removing RSS Feed?
Hi, I have a site that has a Feedburner feed that has been in place for 5+ years. I am considering getting rid of the feed or starting a new one to combat content scraping. Google continues to rank thieves' sites ahead of mine. Google and Bing have no issue and always get it right. I use Wordpress and have the plugin PubSubHubb, but that is no guarantee. Nonetheless, there is no monetary value of my subscribers whereas the content not being accredited to me takes money out of my pocket as my model is advertising. Is there any SEO issue if I do any of the following: Delete the feed and not have one? Change the feed address and drop all subscribers? Attachments: DMCA Dashboard; example of being outranked by scrapers. My site: www.furniturefashion.com Thanks for your time and hopefully I did not vent too much. OWmou6k f6W3xkq.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | will21121 -
Best way to permanently remove URLs from the Google index?
We have several subdomains we use for testing applications. Even if we block with robots.txt, these subdomains still appear to get indexed (though they show as blocked by robots.txt. I've claimed these subdomains and requested permanent removal, but it appears that after a certain time period (6 months)? Google will re-index (and mark them as blocked by robots.txt). What is the best way to permanently remove these from the index? We can't use login to block because our clients want to be able to view these applications without needing to login. What is the next best solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Changing a url from .html to .com
Hello, I have a client that has a site with a .html plugin and I have read that its best to not have this. We currently have pages ranking with this .html plug in. However If we take the plug in out will we lose rankings? would we need a 301 or something?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
Robots.txt & url removal vs. noindex, follow?
When de-indexing pages from google, what are the pros & cons of each of the below two options: robots.txt & requesting url removal from google webmasters Use the noindex, follow meta tag on all doctor profile pages Keep the URLs in the Sitemap file so that Google will recrawl them and find the noindex meta tag make sure that they're not disallowed by the robots.txt file
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0