What is more search engine friendly... Hyphens or Underscore in directory names? Hyphens or Underscore in page names? Hyphens or nothing in domain names? thanks, chad
I remember reading somewhere that underscore is better for page names. Can't back that up with any evidence, though.
I agree .. Google treat it as space More proof at http://www.internet-search-engines-faq.com/space-dash.shtml While google does not treat underscore as space http://www.internet-search-engines-faq.com/space-underscore.shtml p/s Beware! don't change your existing files without checking your ranking. I had few pages with underscore before and i change it to dashes. It was a stupid idea as these pages are ranked high. I lose traffic for a few days until i found the prob. My advise, use dashes for new pages. The old ones, if ranked highly .. maybe leave them alone. Hope that helps!
Hmm. I wonder why I thought I had heard the opposite (underscore is better)? I could have sworn I had read that somewhere....
Underscores will not seperate keywords, so they are out all together. I don't like to use hyphens for domain names if possible. I'll do it if I can't find another domains available but I limit it to one dash. For directories and file names I try to limit dashes to one or two max. Too many hyphens looks spammy to me.
I think hyphens work best. SEO experiments that I've read suggest this. Plus if someone is trying to type out an address from paper or as you read it a hyphen is less confusing. I MUCH prefer nothing from a personal view. Cheers Chris
could someone differentiate a hyphen & dash on the keyboard? in what part of the keyboard that hyphen is located?
I really don't think it makes a difference anymore..... I think Google and other search engines have gotten so used to identifying individual words, that I have actually stopped using hyphens or underscores completely in some instances to really mix things up.... I haven't seen much difference either way.... They know what they are looking at... It's not much like the old days where you had to help them look....
I like to make it readable for the end user also, so I keep the hyphens in the names even though it seems most search engines can break them up. This will also keep things from mingling incorrectly.