hypens, long words or just a /45.php

[nashville]

I read some of the gerat threads about the use of hypens, underscores and etc. But what about long names like

/nashvillehelicopters.php vs simply a number like /45.php

I know this has been mentioned over the years but things seem to change in this area ... even by the time I finish this post maybe

[tamecrow]

Hi Gary,

If you're talking about the naming conventions for filenames, it's best to always use the keywords you are targeting with that page. For example, /bluewidgets.php or /blue-widgets.php. Between these two examples, the hyphenated version is preferred.

I can't see why you would want to call a file '/45.php'. That doesn't tell the user, the search engines, or the webmaster what that page is about, so why do it?

[eJM]

Is there any wisdom concerning the use of underscores? I tend to name my files, separating the words with underscores. I use hyphens in names that are actually spelled with hyphens. Examples: rigid_table_saw_review.php project_add-ons.php

Thanks,

Jim

[tamecrow]

Originally Posted by eJM

Is there any wisdom concerning the use of underscores? I tend to name my files, separating the words with underscores. I use hyphens in names that are actually spelled with hyphens. Examples: rigid_table_saw_review.php project_add-ons.php

Not so much anymore. It used to be that hyphens were the best option as they separate words and underscores are ignored. There is less emphasis on this now, but I'd still definitely advise playing it safe and using hyphens. I wouldn't worry too much about changing old pages - especially if they're ranking well. If they aren't ranking, try changing to hyphens (301 the underscored ones to the new pages) and give that a go. It's not worth compromising current positions if you have them, but is definitely worth using for future pages you create.

[mjtaylor]

In an old post (August 25, 2005) on his blog, Matt Cutts of Google wrote:
"I often get asked whether I’d recommend dashes or underscores for words in urls. For urls in Google, I would recommend using dashes."

More recently (Wordcamp July 21st 2007), Cutts said that Google can read underscores, but that he still recommends using dashes:

"Now the interesting thing is that we used to treat underscores as if they were like word A Underscore word B We would glom that together. And we would index that as A underscore B If you searched for the word A we wouldn’t have returned your post.

"We are in the process of changing that. We might have already changed that.

"So dashes and underscores are almost exactly the same. But in engine world dashes are nice because if there is no space at all the search engine has to segment it.

"And Google can do that pretty well. We can break up words. But can every single search engine? Gigablast, Ask.com, Turbo10, you know, not every search engine will. Keep it simple and search engines will do it better by you."

So, hyphens still seem to be the way to go ...

Cheers, MJ

[eJM]

So, if we want to switch to hyphens instead of the underscores we have been using and want all our old hyphenated file names to revert to dashes, what would the redirect look like using .htaccess to do it? I know how to redirect a single file to the same file with a different name, but it should be possible to redirect all underscored file names to their hyphenated replacements. And I'm not just talking about a file name with one underscore, I have several with 2 or more underscores in the file name.

Next question would be, is there a program that will rename all files containing underscores to file names with hyphens instead?

Thanks,

Jim