I'm using the Ruby on Rails plugin, FriendlyId to create SEO friendly urls based on the name's of the albums and generes within app. If the plugin finds an ampersand in the title it replaces it with a -. So for instance if I have a genre with the name of:Fitness & WorkoutIt's converted to:http://myapp.com/genres/fitness-workoutI was wondering would it be in my best interest to override the plugin and insert the literal word, and instead? Does having the dash character have any negative impact on how my pages are crawled?
Omitting and replacing ampersands in urls
seo;url;url rewriting
I'm pretty sure the word and is in the list of stop words for many search engines. This means and doesn't have value unless someone is using advanced search settings and is trying super hard to search for the word and (by putting that word in the results must contain box) along with other terms in the regular search box on the same page.Also, the word and consumes three characters where as a hyphen consumes only one. Depending on what the client uses to access the URL, if the URL exceeds a certain number of characters, it won't be processed properly. For that reason, I'd try to limit complete URLs to less than 80 characters total.This URL here also recommends using hyphens as word separators in URLs.http://www.ecreativeim.com/blog/2011/03/seo-basics-hyphen-or-underscore-for-seo-urls/