This is yet another Under_score vas Dash-es thread. Just wanted to discuss. Also wanted to see if there are still some of the good Ole hands left at DP. People debated on the advantages and pros and cons of using underscore vs dashes for a long time now. Some people said that dashes are anyday better, and they kept quoting Matt Cutts' blog posts on the same topic. But this is what I have noticed of late. Increasing site URLs with underscores seem to be ranking better than dashes. There are scores of examples, and I know you can get examples of sites with dashes ranking better, but this is just my personal experience, and I am seriosly thinking of doing an experiment myself. I have site A with "DASHES" I will be launching a similar site on an aged domain with underscores and create similar pages. Content will not be duplicated but density etc will be same. PSHHH.. I will buy some links. And I will see if Underscores are indeed better. What are your thoughts? Have you noticed this in your competition watch? Or did I miss a big discussion already again?
i don't think so that under scores are better than the hyphens. all my websites use hyphens and they rank well. my competitors too use hyphens for SEO purposes.
i would think that they both work the same. i myself was always using underscore but recenltly using dashes as well. if you look at the wordpress blog feature and use custom permalink structure to include postname on the URL, you will see that wordpress CMS uses dashes for permalinks which would give us an idea that dashes work just fine. also, when you buy a domain name, you cannot buy a domain with underscore but can get a domain with dashes so dashes must be working well
Yes, I've tried both on various websites and I can't say that one helps more than the other when it comes to SEO