: Omitting and replacing ampersands in urls 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

@Annie201

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.
www.ecreativeim.com/blog/2011/03/seo-basics-hyphen-or-underscore-for-seo-urls/

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