What is the best to use - or _ in google ?

So how is this any different ? or this

or this

HIGHLIGHTED PORTIONS OF WORDS also if you check my site .... ?

 

Google highlights the search terms wherever it finds them. It doesn't mean it's necessarily using those highlighted parts in ranking, or weighting them highly.

In other words, that doesn't indicate that you rank for those terms BECAUSE of a url like world_history or even world_history.

 

aha guess if everyone is saying - is better I should go and make some 301s

 

really no need

feel the difference

- and "-"

really no difference ?

and now

_ and "_"


it shows - is better for keywords optimization but _ works for urls pretty well

 

arghhh now ... Mong will - be better for my History site or should I leave it like it is. You kind of got me convinced in this thread and I would not mind couple of more SE visitors a day hehe

 

iatbm, as I said above, it really doesn't make much difference any more. What small advantage you may gain with switching to dashes/hyphens you may potentially lose in reindexing. Unless your site is very new, leave it as it is. Google gets easily confused these days.

 

Ok great thanks I will leave it since google seems to like my site very much ( good se traffic and bot hitting all day long )the way it is now and has strong pr even in sub pages of sub pages ....

 

What is certain is that Google ignores punctuation. In the
old days the underscore wasn't considered as punctuation,
but as a character.

They may have changed, I haven't necessarily kept up with
them.

wiz

 

I did a test a about a year ago link a page with "-" as the anchor and google completely ignored the link and never indexed the page..

That prove it to me.. "-" = ignore in google eyes..

In regards to url/page name the "-" is easy to type than "_" no need for the shift button..

 

if dmoz and google go with "_" then this should be the way...
although I dont think such things really affects your rankings

 

A-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!! Geeze, that was a good one!!!

The majority of DMOZ editors and Admins know nothing about SEO. And do you really think Google has to worry about SEO for their own pages?

 

that's why dmoz has been dropped from PR9 to PR8

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=150599

http://digpagerank.com/index.php?url=www.dmoz.org&dc=14

 

That is my favorite reason to use the dash!