Underscore or Hypen which is better ?

I'm seeing more hyphens now where a year or two ago, I saw more underscores. E-commerce sites that emphasize SEO offer hypens almost exclusively now.

Take it for what's it's worth.

Here's one - http://www.seo-cart.com/clients/

 

A hyphen works as a localized EXACT operation.... So i go for hyphen...

 

haha
expert sex change.com DD

I would believe Hypens are better then underscores anyways. learn-about-seo.html looks better then learn_about_seo.html

 

Funster, they use dashes instead of underscores to improve their sites' USABILITY, not SEO.

 

These days everyone says its all about backlinks.... more backlinks means your site is placed higher in SERPs....

 

I am not sure who to agree with, however based on my own experience they both rank the same. I don't think any of them really matters, however as Dan Schultz stated above hyphens may increase the web sites usability rather than underscores.

- Meti

 

If a hundred "experts" told you that the best way to increase your SERP rankings is to jump off a cliff, would you listen to them? Of course not. More backlinks in and of themselves will not get you better rankings, especially if the links are coming from crap pages or have the rel="nofollow" attribute on them. Not only that, but you need content to get those links anyway - nobody's going to want to link to a page that looks like a ghost town (unless you pay them to do so, and then they'll only do it because they're making money off of the idiociy of link buying anyway). You need quality content that people will find relevant (which the search engines will pick up on) in order to get those links.

@WatchOut - there's no "may" about it when it comes to improving the accessibility and usability of the links. They will. End of story.

 

Hyphens have always worked better for me...just my personal experience though.

 

oh come on you guys. it really makes no difference. there are many things much more important than hyphens and dashes.

if you think your keywords can be confused by google, then by all means use a hyphen to delimit it. But personally, I prefer domains without any separators. Google won't care, unless it is confused because your domain forms multiple irrelevant keywords.

 

that's because the original keyword domains are all exhausted and people are now registering hyphenized versions as a second best solution.

 

How can you not separate a domain (several keywords) without causing any confusion?

- Meti

 

i can definately say be experience that no hyphens in your url is better

 

sometimes not separating keywords can cause confusion, esp when the unseparated version spells out multiple keywords, including ones you dont want.

example: bestrong.com

is it be-strong, or best-rong (well rong doesnt mean anything but u get the point).

insuch a case it would be worthwhile to add a hyphen.

 

I see, I agree that may cause confusion and rank for some "weird" keywords. Thanks for the explanation manchesterguy, I thought you referred to something completly different.

- Meti

 

Yep, like mentioned, hyphens are great for usability.