I just came across this in an email. Someone inquired about having their pages re-directed. Their rankings dropped and they wanted an idea of what went wrong.

They basically changed all their urls from abc123 to abc-123. Honestly, folks come on! Where did you read that? Matt’s blog? Did you really think that is going to make a big enough improvement on your rankings? Do you realize you just put all your pages in the supplemental?

If they were or weren’t doing well, changing the url is the LAST thing I would do. I try to avoid re-directs at all costs.

Just because Matt Cutt says that “-” are preferred slightly more than “_” doesn’t mean to change your whole site url structure, without understanding how it effects your rankings.

What’s the moral to this story? Don’t do everything you read. Or everything Matt tells you to do. He offers insight and advice, but you need to know how to use it. It is not just about having the knowledge, it’s about knowing when to use it.

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