Quick RewriteRule help needed

I have a url that reads
index.php?dir=10-webtraffic/
would like it to be
category/10-webtraffic/

Then I have links like this
downloads/10-webtraffic/Effectively-Using-Overture-Yahoo-To-Get-Website-Visitors.txt
I would like to replace the "-" with "_"
Does this last part work better for search engine friendly urls


Thank you in advance

 

1) try something like that:

RewriteRule ^index.php?dir=([a-z0-9\-]+)/?$ /category/$1/ [NC,L]

 

Thanks for the try is didnt do anything. I have also decided not to change the hyphens to underscores. Just looking to change the index.php?dir= to category

 

RewriteRule ^category/(.*)$ index.php?dir=$1

Code (markup):

 

knew it wasnt just me that one didnt work either

This is being applied to the 3rd link in my signature didnt work

 

RewriteEngine on 
RewriteRule ^category/(.*)$ index.php?dir=$1

Code (markup):

In which folder are you saving this?

 

its being put in the public_html


I will hire someone to sort this out. I think I have some php code that is conflicting or changing it.

 

Options +FollowSymLinks +Indexes
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^category/([^.]+)/$ index.php?dir=$1 [L]


- are better than _ SEO wise.

 

Nintendo thank you for your try. I am looking for someone to look in to the code as it Htaccess.php which I think is keeping the rewrites from working. I could be wrong.

Thank you also for the "_" "-" answer found out that the "_" actually is ignored by the engines basically removing them and combining the words. where as the "-" is recognized as stop so the engine sees all the words as keywords.

 

your files name should be .htaccess no htaccess.php or as far as i know that is how it should be, it's that way on my sites. I am not on my normal pc that I use for my websites do I dont have any of my files but tomorrow morning if you havnt figured this out I can send you a file to use. (i don't remember the code off the top of my head)

 

I know but in this file it is rewriting things I will supply a snippet of it to show this.

So this file is making the htaccess rewrites not work