Question A couple forum url rewrite questions...

[bzcomputers]

I have a company that will appear occasionally and it's name is "A-Rosa".

Currently if it's name occurs in a thread title (since I have "a" as a stop word) it will look like this:

Example 1
Thread Title: A-Rosa Opens New Office

http://www.mysitename.com/forum/rosa-opens-new-office-a-123/

(notice the -a prior to the thread id in the above url?)

If someone types the name slightly different...

Example 2
Thread Title: A'Rosa Opens New Office

http://www.mysitename.com/forum/arosa-opens-new-office-123/

(this time no -a prior to the thread id?)

Question 1: I guess my understanding of the use of the "-a" within url rewrites was wrong. Is it also used in reference to stopwords? ...because that appears to be the only difference in url rewrites.

Question 2: From Example 1, how can I prevent the stopword "a" from being removed from a hyphenated proper name.

The url I'd liked to see is:

Thread Title: A-Rosa Opens New Office

http://www.mysitename.com/forum/a-rosa-opens-new-office-123/

 

[Fillip H.]

The -a suffix is added to either make URLs unique, or to make sure the regexp still works in case of the rewritten title ending with a number.

 

[bzcomputers]

Is there anyway not to remove a "stopword" if its contained within (at the beginning or end) of an already hyphenated word?

Even with a basic stopwords list there would be issues with words like: a-bomb and by-product

 

[Fillip H.]

This can't really be achieved when - is the separator. As far as DBSEO is concerned, by-product is "by" and "product" as two separate words.

Changing the separator would work, and it wouldn't impact the functionality of existing URLs, but search engines would probably complain some.