Opportunity Technical SEO
URL contains underscores
- Severity
- Opportunity
- Impact
- Low
- Effort to fix
- Medium
- Issue code
url_underscore
Why it matters
Search engines treat hyphens as word separators but not underscores, so words run together.
How to fix it
Use hyphens instead of underscores in new URLs.
How it affects your score
Finding this issue on any page costs the Technical SEO score 0.5 points, plus up to 4 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. A smaller improvement with a modest effect on its own.
Find the affected URLs
Open Crawl > Issues and pick URL contains underscores. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (low) and effort (medium), and in the issues CSV under the code url_underscore. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.