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I'm in the middle of doing a bunch of 301 redirects for me site. Should I make them Lowercase, uppercase, or does it matter? Also, do I want to be using hyphens (-), or underscores (_)?

Any other tips?

EX:

http://www.stupid.com/golf-slippers.html

OR

http://www.stupid.com/Golf-Slippers.html

We're renaming all of our Product URLs (because we're changing eCommerce Platforms), and I'm trying to determine the best strategy to take.

Currently, they are all based on product SKUs. For example, Bacon Dental Floss is:

http://www.stupid.com/fun/**BFLS**.html

Right now, I'm thinking of just using the Product name. For example, Bacon Dental Floss would become:

http://www.stupid.com/fun/**bacon-dental-floss**.html

Is this strategy the best for SEO? Any better ideas?

Thanks!

Thanks Matt - I didn't even think about pagination!

Thanks Daniel - This is SUPER helpful.

So yeah, now it looks like I have to do tons of redirects, possibly to all my products and categories.

So if I potentially had to do 301 redirects to all my Category and Product pages, would I be risking losing my search engine rankings?

Hi -

We're switching eCommerce platforms, and naturally we're worried about losing organic search ranking.

From what I've read on the message boards, I understand it's important to try to minimize as many 301 redirects as possible.

Here's my problem: Our Product URLs are like this (ex: http://www.stupid.com/fun/TOLMG.html). On the new platform, URLs cannot contain capital letters.

According to the new eCommerce platform's design team: "Google and other search engines do not see that as a change in URL, they are not case sensitive and will not affect search listings"

How accurate is this? And how come on our current platform, if I use an all lowercase URL, it get a 401? (ex: http://www.stupid.com/fun/tolmg.html) Will we be fine switching our Product URLs to lowercase on the new platform?

One thing also to note: Our Category URLs will remain the same. Are there any other areas of a typical eCommerce store that I should avoid changing URLs if I want to prevent SEO loss?

Thanks!

-Justin