Internal URL's

Are we doing it correctly?

[JonnyWarwick]

Hi Guys

We run a successful, niche site. We've recently added a new section which consists of various industry related articles - which obviously contain a lot of industry related keywords. The URL's of all the extra pages are configued as follows:-

[#*$!x.com...]

Should we be using the under-scores like that or should we be using dashes ( - ) instead? And should we be using two forward slashes (as above) or will the engines prefer just one / after the .com?

Sorry if the query sounds a little confused but we want to omtimize these sub-pages as effectively as possible. We have a knowledge gap as far as this kind of thing is concerned.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

[edited by: caveman at 4:34 pm (utc) on Mar. 23, 2007]
[edit reason] Please, no specifics, per TOS. [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

http://www.example.com/keyword-keyword/keyword.html
would be preferred. Two slashes are required following the protocol (http:) and one slash should be used for all following parts of the URL. See RFC2396 - Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax [faqs.org].

Hyphens are preferred for two reasons; First, the search engines read hyphenated words as two separate words, but read underscored words as "all one word" -- Therefore a search for "blue_widgets" will return pages which have only that exact sequence of characters, including the underscore, while a search for "blue-widgets" will return pages which have "blue," "widgets," "blue widgets," "widgets blue," "blue-widgets," or "widgets-blue." In other words, a hyphen is treated as a space, while an underscore is treated as a literal character.

The second reason that hyphens are preferred is that underscores can get 'buried' in the link underline, as in webmaster_forum [webmasterworld.com], leading to visual confusion and type-in errors, whereas hyphens will be clearly visible, as in webmaster-forum [webmasterworld.com].

Another aspect which you did not ask about is that you may use page-relative or server-relative URLs, such as <a href="/page1.html">Server-relative link</a> and <a href="page2.html">page-relative link</a>. These are sometimes termed "relative links" while a link like <a href="http://www.example.com/page3.html">this</a> is called an absolute or canonical link. There are dozens of threads here discussing the relative merits of these approaches, and a search [google.com] will turn them up.

Jim