URL underscores
URLs should separate words with hyphens rather than underscores. Silktide reports pages whose addresses contain underscores.
Compare:
https:\/\/example.com\/office_chairs <- underscores
https:\/\/example.com\/office-chairs <- hyphens
Why this matters
Search engines treat a hyphen as a word separator but an underscore as a word joiner: office-chairs is read as "office" and "chairs", while office_chairs is read as one unknown word. Keywords in an underscored URL lose their value for matching search queries.
Underscores are also hard on people. In an underlined link the underscore disappears into the underline, so the URL can appear to contain spaces, and many non-technical users find it difficult to type or dictate an underscore.
How to fix it
- Rename the page's URL slug to use hyphens between words. Most content management systems let you edit the slug, and many can be configured to generate hyphenated slugs automatically.
- Add a redirect from the old underscored URL to the new one, so existing links and bookmarks keep working.
- Renaming established URLs has real costs (redirects to maintain, link value in transition), so weigh these against the benefit. For long-standing pages you decide to leave alone, the finding.
How Silktide tests this
- Take the page's URL, ignoring any query string (the part after
?). - Flag the page if the remaining address contains an underscore (
_) anywhere.