Changing underscores to hyphens

[grantos1]

Our websites are littered with page names separated by underscores and as most, if not all of our products are one to a page that's a lot of underscores!

How much does this effect the overall googleability of the site?

Should I be changing all these to hyphens?

Is there a quick way of changing them all?

Discuss

Grantos

[Duncan Rounding]

Changing them is quite easy. Export the catalog, filter by page name and change them with search and replace and import.

Whether you'd see any difference in Google however is debatable. You would also have to set up permanent redirects in your htaccess file. This might be possible with a single statement that replaces all _ with - but you'd need to search and confirm that.

[grantos1]

Yeah, I suppose I could do the replace in excel easily enough. But our site has been up for years so googles not going to be happy when all the pages have new names is it!?

[Brightstar]

I have just converted all pages from underscores to hyphens.

Has anyone any idea how create a global htaccess re-direct, even if it justs re-directs to the homepage?

Any help appreciated

[Mike Hughes]

Don't do a redirect to the home page. All that does is confuse the search engines.

Just create a custom 404 page that has all your normal navigation and site links and a message along the lines of "this page has moved. Please use the site navigation to find the product or information you're looking for."

Mike

[Steve G Griggs]

I think Mikes way is the best option. Also less to go wrong unless you are really familiar with the htaccess file. Changing htaccess files can be a potential minefield.

[cheaptents]

custom 404 to home page - this sounds a lot like this thread
http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=51809