Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you, George!

Hello.

I just used Open Site Explorer to find inbound links to a site. But it does not seem to list all inbound links.

I will be changing a lot of urls on the site, and I would like to put in 301 redirects only for the pages that have links to them. Is there a way to find all inbound links and the specific pages they link to?

Thank you!

Thank you, Nitin.

Thank you very much, Peter!

Hello.

I am working on a site that was built with underscores in the urls, but only in the page names, not in the subdirectories. All the subdirectories have one-word names.

So a typical url is "example.com/sub1/sub2/page_name."

We would like to change the name of one of the subdirectories to a name that would be very useful for SEO, but this new name is a hyphenated word, let's call it "new-sub."

If we changed "sub2" to "new-sub" then our url would have a mix of underscores and hyphens: example.com/sub1/new-sub/page_name. But if I used "new_sub" instead, google would read the words as connected with an underscore, instead of reading the subdirectory as a hyphenated word, which would be less useful for SEO.

It seems like it might be a problem to have a hyphen in a subdirectory and underscores in the page names. But I want the SEO value of the hyphenated word.

Any recommendations?

Thank you!

Hello.

Should I use a dash or a vertical line in title tags?

Thank you!

Thanks, Nakul!

Thank you, Nakul!

Hello.

We are about to launch a redesigned and significantly expanded site that has traditionally used underscores as separators between words in its URLs.

Would you recommend replacing all the underscores with hyphens? That would then require many 301 redirects to maintain any links that might be out there.

Thank you!

Hello.

Our site was recently rebuilt, and we switched from using index.php in all the urls to not using it at all. We also changed the names of many of our pages. So the urls have been renamed from "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/". While we were at it, we changed from "_" to "-" as our word separators in the urls.

In the .htaccess file, we have a small block of code that strips out "index.php/" from all requests. This code redirects a request for "example.com/index.php/old_page_name/" to "example.com/old_page_name/"

For your information, the code that strips out "index.php/" is:

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^GET.index.php [NC]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} !/uSZWTLna/.
RewriteRule (.?)index.php/(.*) /$1$2 [R=301,L]

Then we have 301 redirects from "example.com/old_page_name/" to "example.com/new-page-name/"

QUESTION 1: Is this two-step redirect approach okay, or would it be better to skip the separate index.php stripping code and simply have 301 redirects that include "index.php" in the urls?

QUESTION 2: Will we lose some of the benefit of the links that have to pass through a 301 redirect?

QUESTION 3: We have 50 or so redirects. Will this affect performance of the site? How many redirects does it take to start affecting performance?

Thank you!

Thank you, Nakul!

Thank you, ColinSV!

Thank you, Robert!

Hello.

Is it useful to have a site listed in the Open Directory Project?

Thank you.

Thank you, Nakul. Great advice!

Yes, I can see the risk of more unwanted click-throughs in the top spot. Thank you, John!

That makes sense. Thank you!

Hello.

How much of a difference does it make in click-throughs to be the first listing in Google Adwords versus the second or third (still at the top of the page)?

Thank you!

Thanks, Jeroen.

Thank you!