Underscores vs. dashes in URLs

Matt Cutts explains the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in a URL.

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• Category

  Science & Technology

[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.

[Ashley Sheridan]

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.

[ScottyDMcom]

Bug; You're thinking of domain names, yes? Traditionally only 37 characters have been allowed in domain names: a-z, 0-9, and -. Upper or lower case is irrelevant in the domain name.

Some phrases should never have their spaces removed. For example: penisland (net) -> pen-island, speedofart (com) -> speed-of-art, are real sites with unfortunate names. More people should use that hyphen.

BTW, China (and other countries) want domains with the full unicode set.

[ScottyDMcom]

Indi; Technically those people are called squatters or cyber-squatters, not spammers.

[Adam Arnold]

This old stuff is so much more informative than the videos you're putting out these days. Please bring back the good stuff :-(

[methodinsane]

How relevant is this info to google/seo in 2013?

[Indi Jones]

Spammers bought many popular non-underscored and non-hyphenated domains and are reselling them at a huge ransom.

[Indi Jones]

Has this methodology or its impact in SEO ranking changed since 2011?

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[Andreas Belivanakis]

Dashes instead of underscores is a no-brainer. The real question is, dashes, or no dashes? In other words, is redwidgets better than red-widgets?

And does the correct answer (if there is one) depend on whether the dash or no dash term is in the domain itself, versus a folder or filename?

[Brian Swanick]

This should be a commandment for local businesses. Thank you to the wonderful person who created 301's...although if you use a CMS, you probably will never have this problem. Others. Just not this one.

[Bug InSoup]

why would I want to use _ when I can simply write twowordstogether?