Underscores and Dashes Revisited
In yesterday’s installment of What They’re Saying About EE, I linked to Erik Regan’s tweet about the possible SEO disadvantages of ExpressionEngine using underscores for URL Titles as a default instead of dashes. A few of us commented that we just switch it first thing or have it as part of our standard config.php file for new projects.
Commenter GDMac chimed in with a good point of his/her own:
IMO this isn’t a single “use dashes or underscore” question. It depends on the particular url-title at hand. i do like dashes as default, but educate your editors and users when a underscore might be handy.
For instance, try a google search for java_script and java-script and see the differences.
Meanwhile, Erik posted a comment noting that Wes from EllisLab posted on Twitter that he would bring this to the dev team and see if the default could be changed.
Posted on Aug 18, 2011 by Ryan Irelan
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Christopher Beckwith — 11:30 on 08.18.2011
I actually sent a tweet to EllisLabs the other day suggesting that they change the default, because even Google explains on their YouTube Blog why you should use dashes by default unless joining words.
http://www.youtube.com/watchv=AQcSFsQyct8&feature=youtube_gdata
David — 15:42 on 08.19.2011
Now if only we can get them to put the slashes back on the end. That and giving a supported method for date based URLs.
GDmac — 07:49 on 08.22.2011
David has a good point. The trailing slash should at least be a config option. Currently i use a modified version of detour that essentially handles a lot of .htaccess functionality (but in one run, instead of multiple 301 redirects as mod_rewrite generally does).
Another perk is EE “sloppy” handling of the trailing slash and, more precise, also the very loose handling of mixed- uppercase and accents. /blog/caf
GDmac — 07:56 on 08.22.2011
(edit: to clarify, i’m not running a SEO company, some of my customers get (quite expensive) monthly SEO reports. They expect the advices from these detailed reports to be run thru on the website, tying down the content and restraining as much as possible to unique content and urls.)