How to change URL for this website

[marknorman]

This post is deleted!

[kimmiedawn]

The underscores that you currently have don't allow Google to view the words separately, so, for starters, you miss out on the advantage of having them recognized as keywords. Whereas, hyphens are word separators.

One thing you want to be sure of is that you create 301 redirects from the old pages individually to the new hyphenated pages if you decide to do that. Otherwise anybody who tries to visit the old page will get a 404 not found error, plus you will lose out on any link equity from backlinks pointing to those pages.

Is it a good idea? Hyphens are far better than underscores. A change to existing site architecture can have disastrous consequences though if done improperly.

[Gyorgy]

Changing underscores to hyphens won't have an impact on your website's SEO performance. Google is smart enough to understand the underscores in the URLs. You website is quite old and probably trusted, so a change in URLs would make more damage than good.

In short: don't change the URLs if your website is fully indexed and performing well at the moment

[Kizinko]

Hi Mark,

I agree with Gyorgy. It will likely do more harm than good to change the underscores to hyphens because then links to those pages will have to go through a redirect.

However, if you are set on making this change here's how you can do it using the .htaccess file. Hope this helps!

`RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !\.(gif|png|jpg|jpeg|bmp)$ [NC]`

<code>rewriteRule ^([^]*)([^]*)([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2-$3-$4 [R=301,L]

rewriteRule ^([^]*)([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2-$3 [R=301,L]

rewriteRule ^([^]*)(.*)$ http://www.payscout.com/$1-$2 [R=301,L]</code>