Underscore or Hypen which is better ?

Hi,

There was a time when Hypen ("-") were the way to go in URL and domain names.

I have heard now search engine gives less importance if URL have more than three hypens in URL and we should use underscore ("_") .

So whats better now a days ?

Thanks

 

It doesn't really matter. I've seen people use underscores and rank higher than people that use hyphens. It all depends on how much backlinks you have.

Use hyphens if you'd like.

 

Neither. And whoever told you that you should use the underscore instead of multiple dashes deserves a brick to the side of the head.

It is however, best to keep the number of dashes (or underscores) to a minimum though. For domain names, none is the preferred number (since people tend to be confused), unless you're dealing with domain names that have multiple keywords that could be interpreted in multiple ways (take "Experts Exchange" for example - if the domain name was expertsexchange.com instead of experts-exchange.com, would the search engines use "Experts Exchange" as the keywords, or would they think the keywords were "Expert Sex Change" instead?).

For directory and file names though, one to two dashes is best (I also prefer the dash because it's visible to people who may otherwise think that the underscore is just a literal blank space). However, Google has now joined the other major search engines in using the underscore as a keyword separator, so feel free to use it if you wish. Just make sure that you keep your human users and visitors in mind when making your decision.

 

I highly doubt the dash (hyphen, if you will, though they are two completely different constructs) and underscore can actually cause pages to rank higher just because one is used more than the other. There have to be other, far more important, factors to consider.

 

Are you sure about that? My buddy that owns myspace codes has always used underscores instead of hyphens - and as always ranked higher than a lot of people in the myspace niche. I'm not sure what the main factor is and I asked him why he doesn't use hyphens and he said because underscores perform better than the hyphens do.

 

He's obviously done some SEO work on the site - not the way I would do things, but that's just me.

 

There is no difference between the two, both are word seperators.

 

i think hypen is much better

 

And it is, for usability, but not SEO (as far as SEO is concerned, there's no difference).

 

Besides for SEO reasons, i've always used hyphen for two other reasons.

http://www.site.com/looks_like_a_space.html

http://www.site.com/doesnt-look-like-a-space.html

And a hyphen is one keypress, underscore requires two keypresses one of which is hitting the hyphen anyway.

 

I agree with the hyphen crowd. From a users perspective it's just easier, though the best solution - most times - is to have a one word domain name -- not that they're easy to come by nowadays!

 

Excellent reply and I totally agree keeping human user informed and would also have to say underscore brutal on logo's etc...

 

IT MATTERS... A LOT, FOR SEO.

"-" is treated as a space in google while "_" is not!

Do a search with multiple words. Do it with "-" in between and "_" in between then words and you'll notice that GOOGLE GOES NOT TREAT "_" AS A SPACE.

 

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9748779-7.html

 

Results 1 - 7 of 7 for digital_point_forums
Results 1 - 10 of about 873,000 for digital-point-forums

or with ""
Results 1 - 10 of about 847,000 for "digital-point-forums"
Results 1 - 7 of 7 for "digital_point_forums"

Do the search and you'll see. Even though Matt Cutts says it does, it doesn't currently treat "-" and "_" the same.

 

Here we go. From Matt Cutts blog in August 2007.

If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says some people thought that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.​

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/

 

I believe they are the same

I might be wrong tho

 

Do a search for "digital point forums free webmaster" without quotes, you will see the keywords bolded in the following URL which shows Google has matched the individual words:

associatedcontent.com/article/373991/digital_point_forums_free_webmaster.html

Right if Google did not see underscores as word seperators, the above URL would be /digitalpointforumsfreewebmaster.html to Google correct?

Do a search of "digitalpointforumsfreewebmaster" and there's no results found showing Google does indeed seperate words connected by underscores. The reason you are seeing those results with your queries is due to literal strings and exact pattern matching because of programming languages.

Example

 

I'm going to stand by my opinion and what Matt Cutts has said - sorry I can't keep continuing this discussion - I've already spent an hour on this thread and writing a post for search engine journal related to it. Thanks for the discussion though.

 

Excelent post sweetfunny you certianly know what your talking abot