How to use underscore for alias name?

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sdae07
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How to use underscore for alias name?

Post by sdae07 » Sun Jul 24, 2011 6:01 pm

Hi there. I'm currently taking a VERY old/mature travel site and turning it into a Joomla 1.7. It's currently just static. In an effort to not lose my SEO and the existing names of the pages, I'm trying to duplicate the exact page names into my Joomla. However, almost all of my page names have an underscore (_) in the names as to separate names, rather than a dash (-). So when creating my pages and using the alias it simply removes the underscore and places the words together. It does not allow me to use underscore in my alias. Is there anyway at all to get around this? I really don't want to lose all my pages in the search engines. Many of these individual pages are ranked well. Thanks for any advice! :-[

apollowebdes
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Re: How to use underscore for alias name?

Post by apollowebdes » Wed Sep 21, 2011 2:06 am

Hi,

I encounted the same problem but found a solution.

When creating article titles i set the alias as per previous page name e.g "travel_event"
Now Joomla will rewrite this as "travel-event" This is fine.
Then i installed sh404SEF and in the "basic configuration" tab of the "sh404SEF configuration" i used the "character replacements list to add " -|_ ", this replaced all - with _.
Then set the "file suffix" to .html which gave my old site page name "travel_event.html"

N.B. If you change the character replace setting first you will need to make you article alias with a dash eg. travel-event. Otherwise the replace setting will replace that - with the _ in alias field which will then cause Joomla alias system to strip the _ again. So create alias with - and this will work. Or create all you alias before installing and setting up sh404SEF and that will work too.

I hope this helps.

I found a few posts looking for this solution, so hopefully they find it.


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