I had a custom script made for me and it appears I made a mistake and didn't catch the issue of the script creating underscore urls instead of hyphens. This issue cannot be fixed via htaccess as I'm aware and my programmers have confirmed this. Apparently it would take some time and money to fix it. However, I do currently have rewrite rules in my htaccess. So, my question is: Which is better? 1. URL's with underscores Ex: /apple_macbook_pro_17_inch_widescreen_500GB_hardrive_2GB_memory/ Some of my product titles are very wordy and long so the underscores may exceed 8 or 9. OR 2. URL structure not seo optimized Ex: product-view.php?productid=6
I read somewhere (actually it was a interview with Matt Cutts) that Google will soon (if not already) treat underscores just as same as the hyphens and he's recommendation was not to bother changing them. But didn't you specified to your programmers to get the URLs hyphen like and not underscore? And why should a client charge because the programmers lack on SEO basics knowledge?
If that news is true, that is great for me. On the second note, I looked within our communications and I for some reason can't find where we talked about url structure. I think i based it off my static pages which they used hyphens instead of underscores so I may have assumed the same for product urls. Not sure where we went wrong, I think it was my fault for not catching it initially.
From a purely SEO standpoint, either underscores or dashes will be fine. You definately WANT search engine friendly URLs, since they're not only friendly to search engines, but people as well. And on that point, I'll go with the dashes over the underscores any day of the week since some people may not notice the underscores and wonder why your site is broken.
hmn..i am using long tail keyword so my domain is very long. So my question it is matter short or long? or as long as a very friendly url? l For example: www.mydomain.com/welcome_to_my_planet_hello_world.html or www.mydomain.com/hello_world.html which one is better?
If thats the case (you have used hyphens) than you shouldn't be charged even a penny since the programmers actually did changed your URL structure without your request and they should be fixing that without any extra charge. As far as it regards the "news" regarding hyphens and underscores interview with Matt Cutts, I will try to find it out tomorrow (it's late night here).
number 1 is obviosly better as id=6 means nothing whereas the name of the topic says it all on what the site is about to humans aswell. If you're site is good to humans it will be good to SE,