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Does anybody know if there is a way to rewrite the urls generated by Apache Roller to make them SEO friendly?

The 2 issues I have with the urls generated by Roller are that they use '_' to separate words (and do not allow '-') and the number of characters allowed in the entry url are fairly limited.

Thanks in advance

user2177336
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1 Answers1

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I'm on the Roller team. Note #5 of my Blogging tips with Roller article should answer your question. (Namely no, but there's a reasonable workaround to get URLs changed.)

I would say the use of the underscore is more pleasing to the eyes than a hyphen to separate words, also it shouldn't have a negative effect on SEO -- just search on "enhancing jaxb artifacts" and you'll see Google pick up my underscore-using Roller blog entry with no problem. Further, many words beyond the five allowed by Roller result in long URLs for users and may not provide much additional SEO benefit.

Glen Mazza
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  • Hi, Thanks for your answer. I agree that underscores are more pleasing sadly google doesn't view them as word separators (see this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQcSFsQyct8) although it doesn't have that much of an impact when you have a fairly new site small details like this counts. – user2177336 Aug 24 '13 at 14:17
  • Hello, as of today Roller 5.1 (snapshot) defaults to using hyphens instead of underscores as word separators in URLs: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ROL-1978. For your other concern, you can make a manual build of Roller and tweak WeblogEntry.createAnchorBase() to include more characters in the URL if desired. – Glen Mazza Nov 27 '13 at 09:40