Simple way to change urls with underscores to hyphens.

December 20, 2009 Webmasters-central.com Search engine Marketing

Changing underscores to hyphens using your .htaccess file:

This method is used ONLY IF YOU HAVE few URLs. Otherwise it will be very difficult for you to update some hundreds of urls by this method.

If you want to change some hundreds and thousands of urls with underscrore to hyphenated urls, check this tutorial.

Here you will use redirect 301 method.

Redirect 301 method:

You need .htaccess file in your root directory.

Open your .htaccess file in your webhost panel.

Copy the following lines into it. Ofcourse change the paths of the files and domain name to yours.

RewriteEngine on

Redirect 301 /product_one.html http://www.yoursite.com/product-one/index.php

Redirect 301 /contact_us/index.html http://www.yoursite.com/contact-us/index.php

Above is the simple way.

You can also achieve the same result with the following modrewrite rule too.

Modrewrite rule:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*$

RewriteRule ^/product_one.html$ http://www.yoursite.com/product-one/index.php [R=301,L]


RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*$

RewriteRule ^/contact_us/index.html$ http://www.yoursite.com/contact-us/index.php [R=301,L]

Remember to keep the ^ and $ signs next to your defined urls.