The following tutorial covers the process of quickly and easily changing or converting your WordPress Tags from using an underscore _ to a dash – for search engine optimization. Google and other search engines do not recognize an underscore as a space. As a result, they will merge multiple keyword phrases into a singular word. Perhaps this not what you want for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your keyword tag phrases. To fix this we can use a dash which is a space recognizable character for search engine crawlers.
Note: If you have previously migrated from WordPress Ultimate Tag Warrior to the Simple Tags plugin, this tutorial is also for you.
Globally Replacing Tag Underscores with Dashes
- Login to your phpMyAdmin section from cPanel or equivalent
- Locate and select your WordPress database from the phpMyAdmin sidebar
- Click the SQL tab from the menu, insert the following lines and click go to apply the changes:
update wp_terms set slug = replace(slug,'_','-');
update wp_terms set name = replace(name,'_',' ');
update wp_tags set tag = replace(tag,'_','-');
- If all goes well, your tags should have been converted from example_text_tag to example-text-tag
- Now you will need to add some information to your .htaccess file to redirect the old tag searches to the new tags. See Using .htaccess to redirect underscores to dashes.
