Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?

On February 26, 2009, Google software engineer Matt Cutts collected questions on Google Moderator and answered many of them on video.

tripstar from Ontario, Canada asked:

Underscores vs hyphens in URLS, does it make a difference? my-page vs. my_page?

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• underscores
• hyphens
• seo

[ontheflipside200]

There was an article on cnet on Matt Cutts from google at WordCamp 2007' proclaiming that google was using underscores as separators.

just google cnet underscore word separators.

Why the preference for dashes when it seems there is no difference?

[GoogleWebmasterHelp]

@ontheflipside200: Matt clarified what he said at WordCamp on his blog on August 10, 2007. Try searching for [Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers] and that should bring it up.

- Wysz, Google Webmaster Central

[somfplease]

underscores make things easier to read in a url especially if posted as a link.

mouseover "QuickList" or "Account" at the top on this page (if logged in). Doesn't google own youtube?

[dushyant78]

I totally agree. Sometimes its a technical challenge, depending on what platform your site is coded in. When you have a large number of high ranking pages, that all follow different URL patterns but use underscores instead of hyphens, there should be no reason to change your site to use hyphens. I have personally seen cases where doing permanent redirects as a method of passing rankings along from an old page to new page are highly ineffective with regards to preserving SERP rankings.

[shagster1970]

@AngelsRamin Dont worry mate - I run more successful websites that rank than I care to count. (More than 500.) I was merely saying that you dont need to be that worried about the minute detail to have a successful income producing website.

[AngelsRamin]

@shagster1970 u r wrong!..update ur self about SEO!

[earthday47]

The most compelling reason to not have underscores as separators is to search for programming functions. Like mysql_real_escape_string(). And does any one else copy error messages and paste them verbatim into Google?

Let's just use % to separate stuff.

[TarheelJ]

I cannot register a domain with underscore in the URL at godaddy or register.com, so is that something they recently changed? Because of that, I'll use hyphens.

[shagster1970]

Wow - if your worried about hyphens or underscores your business/website is in trouble.!

[superdan0468]

I love how Matt moves his hands when he talks. "underscores", "links", "url", etc all have the same hand gesture.

It's also funny that he has to hide a lot of things. It seems that he has a lot to hide and be careful of saying out loud when he makes these videos, as opposed to his blog where he just writes what he needs to.

Thanks for the info on dashes. My clients will be happy with all the information I'm learning from your videos.

[JapaneseChirashi]

yeah, i've been using a mix,but defiantly the underscore should be a separator, it goes back to the days of writing code, programmers have always used underscores, my programming teacher nearly shot me for using a dash!

[shakaama]

I find it much easier to see Underscore, than a dash. And more importantly, I use that as a convention throughout my website, so noone ever gets confused as to what the url is. So they can predict what a url is, or even if they forget, they know it's going to be underscore and not dash.

Dash just looks juvenile to me.

[Gazinbali]

ok. My comment as a NON seo Guru.. i just went to register a site.. the name . lets say.. mynewdog dotcom

when i enter the full text.. the site is taken, when i enter my-new-dog dotcom

that name is available.. when I enter my_new_dogdotcom.. it resolves the same as the plain text and the domain is taken.. I dont know how this fits into the seo

[Flyborg]

Is this still true? I use underscores because it's easier to read, and it's closer to spaces. Hyphens look strange to me. A lot of other people use underscores as well, so I'm confused as to why Google wouldn't "count" them as seperators.