Matan · SEO · Structure

Clean URLs (SEO)

Lowercase, hyphen-separated paths avoid duplicate HTTP variants and look professional.

Pass condition in our engine: The path has no underscores and no uppercase letters.

This SEO check is part of SEO-GEO scoring 2.2.1, last updated 2026-09-18. About 90 percent of the evaluation runs on the HTML we crawl, so you can verify the same pass condition with a free report.

1. Problem description

Underscores and mixed case create two URLs for the same file on many servers (Example vs example). Crawlers treat them as distinct until you canonicalise. Underscores are also harder to select on mobile.

2. Most common causes

  • Legacy ASP/Java apps using CamelCase paths.
  • Export scripts that turn spaces into underscores.
  • Windows filesystems that were copied as-is to Linux.

3. How to fix it

  1. Standardise on lowercase hyphens.
  2. 301 old underscore/uppercase URLs to the clean slug.
  3. Configure the server to lowercase requests if you cannot change links yet.

Test this check

We fetch only this URL (plus robots.txt / llms.txt at the domain root when the check needs them). We do not crawl the rest of the site like a full report.

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