A product link can outlive the campaign that created it. Buyers save it, distributors place it in reference documents, and sales teams send it in conversations that continue for months. That makes an established URL different from a draft page name. Improving the way new addresses are written is a modest editorial decision; changing addresses already in circulation is a migration.

Google's October 23 documentation update clarified why hyphens are preferred to underscores when separating words in URLs. Hyphens signal word boundaries, whereas underscores have historically been used to keep concepts together. The clarification is useful for a website's naming convention. It does not, by itself, establish a reason to rename every product page or promise an improvement in search performance.

Decide what the address needs to identify

For a new English product page, a short descriptive product phrase plus a necessary model identifier is usually easier to maintain than a path assembled from every possible selling point. The URL should help someone recognise the destination. It does not need to repeat the specifications, target countries, campaign slogan and current offer in one long string.

This matters when overseas marketing teams work with Chinese manufacturers whose internal naming systems were designed for production rather than public browsing. A warehouse identifier may be meaningful to the factory but unfamiliar to a distributor. Keep the official model visible on the page, and use readable descriptive wording where it helps the audience. Do not invent a new product identity merely to make a URL sound attractive.

Treat punctuation inside a model number carefully. A general recommendation about separating ordinary words is not permission to alter the manufacturer's identifier in specifications or purchase records. The public address and the displayed model can use different conventions, provided their relationship is unambiguous. Confirm that relationship before changing templates that generate many pages at once.

There is also a distinction between changing a headline and changing the object a page represents. A manufacturer may rewrite an application-led headline while continuing to describe the same product. If the publishing system automatically changes the address with every title edit, routine copy improvements can create unnecessary broken references. Agree on stable page identity before automating naming.

Existing addresses have a different cost

An underscore in an established URL does not prove that Google cannot crawl the page. The documentation discusses several other structural issues, including parameters and case sensitivity. Diagnose the observed problem before choosing the remedy. A readable address will not compensate for an unclear product description, and replacing a separator is not evidence that a buyer will find the page more easily.

For a healthy catalogue, applying the convention to new pages may be the least disruptive option. If there is a genuine reason to change existing paths, start with an old-to-new mapping that preserves the destination's meaning. Sending every retired product address to the home page keeps a visitor on the domain but abandons the question that brought them there.

Check more than the site's navigation. Distributor documents, emailed quotations, printed literature and language-version references can all depend on the original address. A redirect should take the reader to the corresponding product, while links that the team can edit should point directly to the intended current location. Plan these dependencies before announcing that the migration is complete.

Printed references deserve special attention because the publisher cannot recall them. As discussed in keeping product pages useful after a trade fair, a scanned code may remain part of a buyer's research long after an event. A URL cleanup should preserve that route, not require the buyer to search the catalogue again.

Responsibility is shared. The content owner can confirm whether two names identify the same product; the website maintainer can confirm how old requests are handled. Neither check replaces the other. A technically working redirect to the wrong variant is still a poor handoff, just as a correct mapping that was never implemented does not help the reader.

Chinese exporters planning a new international catalogue can settle the convention before uploading content and avoid much of this later work. Teams with an existing catalogue should make the decision page by page or by a well-defined group with the same problem. Where the current addresses remain understandable and dependable, there is no need to create a site-wide migration solely for visual consistency.

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