301 Redirect to go from Underscores to Hyphens

[Dr Acula]

I have an old site that I'm giving a fresh coat of paint. Very old site, lots of decent ranking.

Problem is, it uses underscores instead of hyphens. Which, as we know is bad for SEO.

Do you think it's worth the risk to use a 301 redirect on each link (about 500) and change the links to hyphens?

DA

 

[the_demon]

Honestly hyphens and underscores doen't make a big difference. However, you could likely write a .htaccess rule or two that would do it for all the urls on your site. Also, no, it shouldn't hurt rankings much if at all.

I've changed url structure before and so long as you submit a revised site map and have your .htaccess redirecting properly it's not a big deal at all in my experience.

 

[Dr Acula]

Honestly hyphens and underscores doen't make a big difference. However, you could likely write a .htaccess rule or two that would do it for all the urls on your site. Also, no, it shouldn't hurt rankings much if at all.

I've changed url structure before and so long as you submit a revised site map and have your .htaccess redirecting properly it's not a big deal at all in my experience.

Thanks for the reassurance on this. I think I'll go ahead with the redirect.