dash vs. underscore

Is it better to use a dash or underscore to seperate keywords in a URL. Or does it make no difference at all?

www.my-website.com/this-is-a-webpage.html
OR
www.my_website.com/this_is_a_webpage.html

Cheers

 

The difference is that a - will be treated as a space, while a _ won't.

However, I really can't imagine any engine giving any extra value for using either of them.

 

Would be better to provide the url of your source instead of just saying "something from someone important".

 

I'd say dash because you don't have to hold down the shift key.

 

Maybe Matt Cutts is the important person you're referring to?

Anyway the verdict seems to be that dashes > underscores:

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

 

Nice find, I had forgotten about that blog

 

that'd be my reason too

 

I would much rather use dash instead of underscore when I have to separate keywords in the URLs. A dash is treated as a word separator while underscore isnt.

For instance, my-keyword will be taken as my keyword whereas my_keyword will be taken as mykeyword.

 

For google, use any one in URL. Google does not give any importance to keywords in urls. But of others dash ( - ) is better, as said _ is not a word saperator.

Having keywords in anchor text is much to care of and not keyword in URL.

 

I think, google do gives importance to keywords in URL. Even then, i wont advice on having more than two Hyphens in a url, and also would suggest using Caps for the first letter in url, so that the bots wont think that the page was made by any of those equalizer softwares available on the net.

A good url can be:
<domain.com>/Keywordone-Page.html
or
<domain-Keyword>/Keywordone-Page.html etc.,

 

The use of keywords (with - or _ ) in URL is spammy.

 

Hi Dakait., I see - in your domain too .
xanersoft-expert-seo-company.com/ is this spammy?

 

Haha true!

 

Ummm....

I think I need to drop this domain.

Sincerly....I worry about it.

Soon you will see something at www.xanersoft.com

 

hmmmmm sounds like if should just mod rewrite all my sites and replace all the '_' with '-'. Thanks for the input.

PS here is the mod rewrite I came up with. Use it if you like. Or tell me a better way to do it.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.*)-(.*)$
RewriteRule ^(.*)-(.*)$  $1_$2 [N]

Code (markup):

 

Yeah, but I bet you wouldn't even lose 1% of your visitors over that matter.

 

well, no if you had good content, and something to keep people coming back they'd type anything really.