: When you use dash as space what do you use for dash? The design decision was to automatically replace spaces with dash (-) when building URLs. This led to URLS such as example.com/user/john-smith.

@Michele947

The URL does not need to contain such level of detail.

It is perfectly fine to have the url you propose: example.com/user/freddy-double-barrel for Freddy Double-Barrel.

From a SEO point of view, the url should cover two aspects:


be appealing to users
describe what the page is about


A url like example.com/user/freddy-double--barrel or example.com/user/freddy-double_barrel does not change anything, they even look a bit unnatural to me.

Most of the slugs generator strip special characters from the title to create a clean and readable url.

Consider the following example, this is the first result in Google for guillain-barre:



The webpage url is: www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/guillain-barre-syndrome/basics/definition/con-20025832 with guillain-barre-syndrome, but its title is: Guillain-Barre syndrome



As long as your page title, meta description and/or content properly says Freddy Double-Barrel, it is perfectly fine to keep the current slug scheme.

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@Dunderdale272

I suggest you use underscore for space replacement and dash for dash so "Freddy Double-Barrel" becomes freddy_double-barrel.

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@Hamaas447

example.com/user/freddy-double-barrel can be resolved (maybe) with a directory. For example:

example.com/user/lastname/freddy


OR

You might do the best thing which would be:
client.example.com/lastname/firstname/index.html

IF YOU CAN - Avoid the dashes.



Off topic note: I put your subdomain into https in order to build the trust with your users.

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