eZ Publish 3.10 will be with us in the eZ network in the next month or so. So it is time to do some preparation if you follow your site statistics. The reason is due to the way that eZ publish displays URLs.

Currently if your article had the title "my great article" the URL would have underscores added to it by eZ Publish so would look like be "my_great_article". Now, this is fine for us humans, but as it turns out Google does not like it. what it sees is "mygreatarticle" not so good and it lowers your search ratings.

To the rescue comes eZ 3.10 you can now change the underscore to a dash, so your URL will look like "my-great-article".
So why the problem with statistics?

This all has to do with how statistics packages record statistics, they are all tied to the URL. This means as soon as you make the change to replace the underscores with dashes ALL your pages that have spaces in the title will be reset. This is because your statistics package will see them as new pages.

For this reason we recommend you at the end of the month before you upgrade you do a year to date statistic capture. This will mean you can start fresh when the 'new' page URLs come on stream.

A note for Google Analytics users you will need to update your Goals for the changed URLs.