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Underscore in address

url.contains_underscores
Priority
Low
Severity
Info

What we look for

The path of these addresses (the part after the domain) holds underscores (_).

Why it matters

Google recommends hyphens between words in an address, because it reads a hyphen as a word break and may not read an underscore that way.

How to fix

Use hyphens instead of underscores in new page addresses. The gain is small, so change an existing address only with a 301 redirect (a permanent forwarding rule) from the old one.

Where you’ll see it

The id is stable, and every surface uses it, so it’s the thing to search for or hand to an agent.

Terminal
When it is one of the five findings under Fix first, raptor crawl prints the id under it.
Check: url.contains_underscores
crawl.json and the CSV
The crawl JSON names the finding by this id, and so do the CSV and raptor_query.
"check_id": "url.contains_underscores"
The HTML report
This link opens the finding in the report, and each finding shows its id.
crawl.html#finding=url.contains_underscores
MCP
raptor_findings with this check_id returns the finding in full, with a fix brief ready to paste into a task. If it didn’t fire, it says why.
raptor_findings {
  "job_id": "...",
  "check_id": "url.contains_underscores"
}