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
-
Old url is still indexed
A couple of months ago we requested a change of address in Search console. The new, correct url is already indexed. Yet when we search the old url (with site:www.) we find that the old url is still indexed. in Google Webmaster Tools the amount of indexed pages is reduced to 1. Is there another way to remove old urls?
Technical SEO | | conversal0 -
Adding a parameter to the URL / URL Stracture
Dear Community, I would like to ask a question regarding url structure. We are struggling with shorting urls and we thought to add a "parameter" to the url. Example: domain.com/product**/a/** or domain.com**/a/**product/ Current url structure: domain.com/product/ So we go after and short url contains "/a/" and find the category we want. Is this going to harm our SEO strategies? Any idea is welcome.
Technical SEO | | geofil0 -
URL Parameters as pagination
Hi guys, due to some changes to our category pages our paginated urls will change so they will look like this: ...category/bagger/2?q=Bagger&startDate=26.06.2017&endDate=27.06.2017 You see they include a query parameter as well as a start and end date which will change daily. All URLs with pagination are on noindex/follow. I am worrying that the products which are linked from the category pages will not get crawled well when the URLs on which they are linked from change on a daily basis. Do you have some experience with this? Are there other things we need to worry about with these pagination URLs? cheers
Technical SEO | | JKMarketing0 -
Google is not indexing my new URL structure. Why not?
Hi all, We launched a new website for a customer on April 29th. That same day we resubmitted the new sitemap & asked Google to fetch the new website. Screenshot is attached of this (GWT Indexed). However, when I look at Google Index (see attachment - Google Index), Automated Production's old website URL's still appear. It's been two weeks. Is it normal for Google's index to take this long to update? Thanks for your help. Cole VoLPjhy vfxVUsO
Technical SEO | | ColeLusby0 -
AJAX and High Number Of URLS Indexed
I recently took over as the SEO for a large ecommerce site. Every Month or so our webmaster tools account is hit with a warning for a high number of URLS. In each message they send there is a sample of problematic URLS. 98% of each sample is not an actual URL on our site but is an AJAX request url that users are making. This is a server side request so the URL does not change when users make narrowing selections for items like size, color etc. Here is an example of what one of those looks like Tire?0-1.IBehaviorListener.0-border-border_body-VehicleFilter-VehicleSelectPanel-VehicleAttrsForm-Makes We have over 3 million indexed URLs according to Google because of this. We are not submitting these urls in our site maps, Google Bot is making lots of AJAX selections according to our server data. I have used the URL Handling Parameter Tool to target some of those parameters that are currently set to let Google decide and set it to "no urls" with those parameters to be indexed. I still need more time to see how effective that will be but it does seem to have slowed the number of URLs being indexed. Other notes: 1. Overall traffic to the site has been steady and even increasing. 2. Google bot crawls an average of 241000 urls each day according to our crawl stats. We are a large Ecommerce site that sells parts, accessories and apparel in the power sports industry. 3. We are using the Wicket frame work for our website. Thanks for your time.
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC0 -
Subdomain CMS or unique URL
I own a company for teams Ex myteams.com . A team registers and they get a site at team1.myteams.com. Content on each sub team site is mostly unique and I have several back links on each to the main site myteams.com. I also provide them with a unique URl team1.com will show team1.myteams.com. So couple questions As far as SEO should i be pushing the team1.com url or team1.myteams.com url? Is a link from team1.com or team1.myteams.com better for my site, their site or both How many back links should the sub sites have? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MichaelRyan220 -
Multi- language URL best practices
we have two different content perlanguage (Fr. EN )) they are not Duplicated and they are completly different. what is better for the URL a language sub domain or a folder fr.mycompany.com or mycompany.com/fr/
Technical SEO | | omarfk0 -
Google & Separators
This is not a question but something to share. If you click on all of these links and compare the results you will see why _ is not a good thing to have in your URLs. http://www.google.com/search?q=blue http://www.google.com/search?q=b.l.u.e http://www.google.com/search?q=b-l-u-e http://www.google.com/search?q=b_l_u_e http://www.google.com/search?q=b%20l%20u%20e If you have any other examples of working separators please comment.
Technical SEO | | Dan-Petrovic3