Underscores vs. dashes in URLs

[azsum73]

what about capital letters?

How Google deals with "RedWidget" and "redwidget" or "REDwidget"?

cheers

[sonnyhe2002]

Well now it's time to change all my URIs

[thundergr]

underscores and dashed should be treated equally or else quality content may rank lower. you should fix it.

[MessageFromHome]

Thaaaaanks Matt!

[meltinzone]

Hi Matt,

Do you have the same updated opinion for new sites when it comes to the Title and pipes | vs. dashes - scenario? Albeit dashes would be the preferred/optimal preference?

[I3Gertrude309]

alright!!!

[CREva602]

well... ok

[chicoIndio76]

Please Google, do not use _underscore as a separator, we have lost "define:" operator in searches and I still miss the time when I could search for strings in a back-trace and find relevant information that has helped find a solution..

[alexbtroyes]

Hi Matt,

I agree for the urls but what about the domain names ?

Is that better with dash our without dash ?

Thanks ;)

[Xtremecarpetcleanin1]

thanks every thing helps

[TuscaloosaBum]

Mr. Cutts,

Thank you for taking the time to explain what Google does with _ and -. However, I'm a Cuttlet who would rather see the _ used as a separator and joiner in the url. Index both. For years I've made pages with _ in the url for the same reason the original Google kids made _ a join operator. Because I write my code like that. I really only care about it in the url. My urls are helpful to the user's experience. A keyword in the url should be worth at least as much as in an H3 tag IMHO.

[rickvidallon]

I_found_this_video_to_be_very_­informative!

[maxxdelusional]

I think they need to split for PascalCase as well, not sure if they do.

[RickBullottaPA]

Here's a radical and revolutionary idea. INDEX IT BOTH WAYS. Not exactly rocket science now, is it? Problem solved.

[ozh]

What a fugly t-shirt, seriously

[SNW175]

TMP_MAX - Haha. Altavista wins you my username.

š/\/\/\/

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šNW

Here is my gift for having the last Mr. Cutts, and only Mr. Cutts blog to explain the P/R that is going to occur with PR. With no PR.

¾♥¾ ,

insert ipv4 address

[vesnaartru]

Понять бы в общих чертах, о чем говорит иностранец?

[softronixredplanet]

Thank you for making my mind clear about dashes and under-score, when i started working in SEO i read Google's SEO book about URL's and how pages optimize and it was an awesome video introduction and clarification for my mind.

[good573]

You the man Matt!

[sKIPper76M]

PLEASE UPVOTE

There is also a usability problem with having underscores in URLs. Since URLs are generally displayed with an underline, an underscore in the URL could potentially get "lost" in the user's eyes. Thus, that underscore may be perceived as a space.

This may be not be a problem if the user just needs to click on the URL (wherein the perception whether its an underscore or space doesn't matter), but it may be a problem in cases such as dictating the URL to a friend over a phone, etc.

[PrestigeSeattle]

THANK YOU! subscribed!

[TalesOfCuriosity]

Could I suggest that you add an option in webmaster tools "split on underscore". By default this is off. So if you are one of the idiot "underscore" webmasters like me you can opt in.

This should then mean that the project to split is really a lot simpler to implement in respect of checking for webwide impact etc.

You'll be producing better quality results!

Smart idea eh?

Regards,

Mark

[saundebn]

Let's be clear, this is a well made, helpful video. That said...

So you're inherently disadvantaging any CMS that uses underscores in its URLs by indexing things in a confusing, arbitrary way because of a programming decision make over two decades ago. And since fixing it hasn't been a priority for over two decades, it probably never will be.

Just making sure we're clear.

[deek282828]

Thanks Matt, at least for using dashes vs. underscore it is clear now. But what about using a plus (+) for spaces? Since replacing spaces by plus sign is a really old standard, even google is using the plus in their search queries, and it is recommended in html5 RFCs. Thanks for a quick official reply on this issue.

[polyglut]

@adithecool yes, this is just one of the 200 signals. But the other 100, or just 50 of them, are about title, position, number of links, header placement, size of page, and so on. So, content farmers, spammers, or big sites like seo land or tech crunch etc, thrive on these. That is the problem.

[eduard4455]

dash good

[CostaRicaResorts]

Now I understand, thanks Matt

[SCKWebWorks]

Good video Matt, I did think that was the case. Keep them coming.

[polyglut]

this annoys me personally too. i choose underscore _ as space separators for file names, not dash. Because, when forced between these 2 choices, underscore is a better choice to stand for space because dash has significance in english words. For example, look at these file names:

“seashell/pink-mouthed_murex”

“emacs/emacs_kill-ring.html”

“emacs/ms_keyboard/f-lock_key_­problem.html”

“elisp_make-citation.html”

“blog_past_2011-01.html”

“ClassicalMusic_dir/midi/chopi­n/etude/Op25_dir/ch_25-04.mid”

[svivian]

@polyglut But it's really not important, when a user is looking at a URL, whether "pink-mouthed" is a hyphenated word or not. And most users don't pay a huge amount of attention to URLs, they might scan it before clicking the link but that's it. And using a *mixture* of underscore and dashes is gonna be even more confusing for users typing URLs.

[polyglut]

this really sucks, and is a prime example how google giving SEO advice really hurts real content creators who are not familiar with SEO.

because google is doing this, as shown in this video, it gives companies and spammers who has lots of money and time to fine tune their website for ranking higher, while vast majority of others high quality content producers, e.g. professors who blogs occasionally, won't know or care about these things. So, their high quality writing went down.

[adithecool]

@polyglut Google uses over 200 signals to rank a web page for a search result. Dashes vs Underscores is just one of them. It isn't the end of the world.

[MrAshleySheridan]

@polyglut Yeah I agree. It's terrible when a company has a service and then tells us how to make best use of it. It's as bad as those help pages for all the software on my computer. How dare they tell me how to use it, now other people are going to be more productive than me because they are reading the same docs.

[sportzchick7]

Thanks. Right on time.