SEO Quicktip: Underscore or Hyphen in URLs
October 16th, 2007Update 2007-10-19: as our readers Aaron and Kai have kindly pointed out to me, this is no longer an issue. Hyphens & underscores are now treated equally by Google.
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Well, here’s something I wasn’t aware of until moments ago. When using SEO-friendly and user-friendly URLs, always go for hyphens instead of underscores.
Good:
/seo-quicktip-underscore-or-hyphen-in-urls
Bad:
/seo_quicktip_underscore_or_hyphen_in_urls
Why? Because according to this post, Google doesn’t recognize the underscore as a divider. Basically, that means you would have to include the underscore in your search term to bring up the URL. I don’t think anybody actually does that. Clearly a point for Team Hyphen. I’m just glad WordPress does “good” URLs out of the box.
parasight.de
October 17th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Hymen in URL! LAAAAAAAAAWL ^^
October 17th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Matt Cutts talked about this a while ago: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
But I remember reading something else more recent by him where he states that google is now able to tell the difference between an underscore as a divider and one that is actually part of the word.
His advance though was that if you are building a new site, you should probably still look to use hyphens. But if you have an older site that uses underscores don’t worry about it :)
October 17th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Tatsächlich ist es so, dass beides ok ist. Sicherer bzw. zeitgemäßer sind die Bindestriche. Früher hat Google die Underlines empfohlen…
October 18th, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Wow, that is brutal penalization.
On a similar note I was talking to a friend saying that google is now penalizing sites that both buy and sell text links. I guess it works out well for google since they have adsense.
Can you say monopoly?
October 19th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
Thank you, Aaron and Kai, for your feedback. I’ll update my article shortly to reflect the changes.