URLs with dashes between words or nothing at all? ( ../some-content vs. ../somecontent)
-
Here's a quick and easy question:
Is there any problem with not using dashes in between words for URLs?
Obviously the readability factor is a concern, but from a search engine standpoint?
Thanks in advance!
-
Great insight guys. I knew I would be going with dashes along but I was having a friendly debate within the office.
Thanks again!
-
I'd go with hyphens for two main reasons. I am sure there are more.
-
It's a common best practice. Hyphens are used to to separate words in a keyword phrase (new-content).
-
It's a small win for usability because it is easier on the eye. http://www.yourbrand.com/somecontentaboutaproduct is harder to read http://www.yourbrand.com/than some-content-about-a-product. Think about it through the eyes of an interested party who finds the link from a social share. Getting design right isn't just about color, white space and layout, but how the overall brand appears.
-
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
-
Duplicate Content
I am trying to get a handle on how to fix and control a large amount of duplicate content I keep getting on my Moz Reports. The main area where this comes up is for duplicate page content and duplicate title tags ... thousands of them. I partially understand the source of the problem. My site mixes free content with content that requires a login. I think if I were to change my crawl settings to eliminate the login and index the paid content it would lower the quantity of duplicate pages and help me identify the true duplicate pages because a large number of duplicates occur at the site login. Unfortunately, it's not simple in my case because last year I encountered a problem when migrating my archives into a new CMS. The app in the CMS that migrated the data caused a large amount of data truncation Which means that I am piecing together my archives of approximately 5,000 articles. It also means that much of the piecing together process requires me to keep the former app that manages the articles to find where certain articles were truncated and to copy the text that followed the truncation and complete the articles. So far, I have restored about half of the archives which is time-consuming tedious work. My question is if anyone knows a more efficient way of identifying and editing duplicate pages and title tags?
Technical SEO | | Prop650 -
vs.
I have a site that is based in the US but each page has several different versions for different regions. These versions live in folders (/en-us for the US English version, /en-gb for the UK English version, /fr-fr for the French version, etc.). Obviously, the French pages are in French. However, there are two versions of the site that are in English with little variation of the content. The pages all have a tag to indicate the language the page is in. However, there are no <hreflang>tags to indicate that the pages are the same page in two different languages.</hreflang> My question is, do I need to go through and add the <hreflang>tags to each page to reference each other and identify to Google that these are duplicate content issues, but different language versions of the same content? Or, will Google figure that our from the tag?</hreflang>
Technical SEO | | InterCall0 -
Http:// to https:// 301 or 302 redirect
I've read over the Q & A in the Community, but am wondering the reasoning behind this issue. I know - 301's are permanent and pass links, and 302s are temporary (due to cache) and don't pass links. But, I've run across two sites now that 302 redirect http:// to https://. Is there a valid reason behind this? From my POV and research, the redirect should 301 if it's permanent, but is there a larger issue I am missing?
Technical SEO | | FOTF_DigitalMarketing1 -
Why are URLs like www.site.com/#something being indexed?
So, everything after a hash (#) is not supposed to be crawled and indexed. Has that changed? I see a clients site with all sorts of URLs indexed like ... http://www.website.com/#!category/c11f For the above URL, I thought it was the same as simply http://www.website.com/. But they aren't, they're getting indexed and all the content on the pages with these hash tags are getting crawled as well. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | wiredseo0 -
Marketing URL
Hi, I need a bit of advice on marketing URL's. The destinations URL is http://www.website.com/by-development.php?area=Isle Of Wight&development=developmentname. If we wanted to use www.website.com/developmentname on literature to send people to the ugly URL above, what would we do? Would we need to rewrite the ugly URL to the neat and then 301 the ugly to the neat? Currently, the team are using a new domain of neatandrelevant.info and 301 redirecting it to ugly URL but there are lots of different developments they want to send people to so a new domain is bought for each development which seems a bit unnecessary. They point to different pages on the ugly URL website. Assuming canonical tag would not be needed then because the ugly URL page would be redirected. Also, as the website has ugly URL's anyway, would it not be best practice to use rewrites anyway so that the URL's read www.mywebsite.com/region/development? Would it confuse things to then have extra short marketing URL's missing out /region? Hope that makes sense....
Technical SEO | | Houses0 -
Duplicate Page content / Rel=Cannonical
My SEO Moz crawl is showing duplicate content on my site. What is showing up are two articles I submitted to Submit your article (article submission service). I put their code in to my pages i.e. " <noscript><b>This article will only display in JavaScript enabled browsers.</b></noscript> " So do I need to delete these blog posts since they are showing up as dup content? I am having a difficult time understanding rel=cannonical. Isn't this for dup content on within one site? So I could not use rel="cannonical" in this instance? What is the best way to feature an article or press release written for another site, but that you want your clients to see? Rewritting seem ridiculous for a small business like ours. Can we just present the link? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
I'm redesigning a website which will have a new URL format. What's the best way to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones? Is there an automated, fast way to do this?
For example, the new URL will be: https://oregonoptimalhealth.com/about_us.html while the old one's were like this: http://www.oregonoptimalhealth.com/home/ooh/smartlist_1/services.html I have redirect almost 100 old pages to the correct new page. What's the best and easiest way to do this?
Technical SEO | | PolarisMarketing0 -
Crawl reveals hundreds of urls with multiple urls in the url string
The latest crawl of my site revealed hundreds of duplicate page content and duplicate page title errors. When I looked it was from a large number of urls with urls appended to them at the end. For example: http://www.test-site.com/page1.html/page14.html or http://www.test-site.com/page4.html/page12.html/page16.html some of them go on for a hundred characters. I am totally stymied, as are the people at my ISP and the person who talked to me on the phone from SEOMoz. Does anyone know what's going on? Thanks So much for any help you can offer! Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0