Dashes or Underscroes

Hello friends,

Should i use '-' or '_' in my URL to separate out the words? Also, please tell the reason

Thanks
Shailendra

 

dashes are fine. avoid underscore.

the reason why is that I guess Google appreciate any technical solution that can provide a good usability as well, In this case if definetely easier to read a URL with - rather than underscores in between words.

my two cents of course.

 

dashes are better than underscore.
M4tt Cutt5 (G00gle Eng1neer) has written about it:

m4ttcutt5.c0m/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

 

thanks linkmonkey

 

In the domain name it's probably going to be a turnoff to visitors.

 

Its http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

Thanks linkmonkey

 

If one wanted to change their links from _ to - with a few hundred pages and a few thousand link on those same pages how would you go about it?

Also if you did change all those file name how long will it take of the search engines to re-index the new pages? This is assuming that there are still a couple of hundred pages that the names will not change.

 

Google has now stated that they would like the "hyphen".

 

Only dashes

 

change only 10 links and see first, let google index the changes.

then if the results are positive change some more.

do gradually.

dont give a shock to the search engines and if you have a great traffic you will have to do things gradually and only if the search engines welcome your url changes.

means if they index the changed urls then you can go ahead gradually.

 

How long should I wait for indexing?

 

I choose dashes instead of underscores. Google won't algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url.

 

Why Use: I recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.

Overly complex URLs, especially those containing multiple parameters, can cause a problems for crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site. As a result, Google-bot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all the content on your site.

Hope it Helps

Suhaana Khan

 

you should use dashes. why?

first, google can distinguish underscores and dashes so you shouldn't have problems if you use underscores.
but what about the other search engines like yahoo, msn, altavista who recognize underscores as a part of a URL?

so its safe to use dash than underscore.

 

Google will penalize your for underscores, go with the hyphens.

 

although its true that it create bandwidth problem while fetching the result but there is no penalty for underscore

 

I'd say a - dash. Underscores don't look too good in a URL.

 

Don't forget you need to 301 redirect all URLs to their new equivalents.

 

2 questions on the 301 redirect

1) Is there a max amount of lines (or file size created) you can put in the .htaccess file

2) How long should these lines stay in the .htaccess file?