Talk about frustration! I spent like three hours trying to figure out how to do this with plugins and changing code. It was much simpler than all that, so I make a video about how to do it.
Transcript
This video from ShowMeHowToDoThis.com is going that show you how to change underscores to dashes inside of Movable Type when you're trying to change filenames. So, for example, you have a page like this which has a web address like this. And in this web address, it has how_to_do_it. It is all separated by underscores. What you want is for it to actually be separated by dashes "-". So how we are going to get that switched is actually inside of Movable Type. The newer versions of Movable Type actually incorporate this right in to Movable Type itself so, I am going to go ahead and log in to Movable Type here and show you how to change that. So now I'm logged in to Movable Type and this is a test account that I have set up. I am going to go over here on the left to settings. Now if you have not switched to detailed settings yet, you want to go ahead and switch this, over here, so that you switch to detailed settings. So, now that I have switched into the detailed settings, I can do all kinds of different things, but for this video what were going to do is go ahead and change the publishing.
So this is lower down on the page on the actual publishing tab, and in here you can see that you can set the individual archive type to be whatever you want it to be. And they give you a bunch of different options here. Well, if you want it to be dashes make sure you get the one that says primary-category. And then entry--base name. Or select any of the other ones in here that have –entry- base name and you can set it to be whatever you want.
You want to get the ones that actually have the dashes in them and you go ahead and switch it to that. And go ahead and click save changes. That will go ahead and make the change for you once you go ahead and republish your site.
Hopefully that has been helpful for you. If you would like to see more how-to videos on how to do everything come visit us at ShowMeHowToDoThis.com again.
Oh and one other thing I wanted to tell you. A lot of the stuff I've learned that I show in this video has actually come from a guy named Dave Taylor. There is a link right here, if you're viewing this on ShowMeHowToDoThis.com, there's a link right here on the page that says, check out Dave Taylor's course. You can also subscribe his newsletter and a bunch different things anyway, if you are interested in learning more about how to really make Blogging an effective (and profitable) thing for you, I really recommend you check out Dave Taylor's course because it is really, really helpful.
So hope you are having a great day and thanks for visiting us at ShowMeHowToDoThis.com
There are a number of factors that have an influence on the ranking of a page in Google's result lists. Of course the page's content is analyzed with respect to the searched keywords. However, the words appearing in the domain name and the file name also have some influence on the results. Thus, for achieving the best result it is important to know how Google splits a URL into words....it is widely accepted that certain characters inside a URL are regarded as delimiters. Unfortunately the underscore is not one of those delimiters - but the dash is.
This means that Google will not recognize three distinct words in the following filename.
sell_used_cars.htm
https://www.movable-type-weblog.com/archive/entry/filename-with-underscore-or-dash.html
Reasons you may want to change underscores to dashes are focused on here.
Dashes vs. underscores
GoogleGuy Confirms that Underscores are not Word Separators
Google test : hyphen and underscore