SEO Quicktip: Underscore or Hyphen in URLs
Tuesday, 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.