I would like some expert opinion please should i use _ or - in urls for my directory whihc i am preparing and why?
i dont get the comma bit i guess you meant something else what i meant to ask was should i use http://www.aimpr.com/Arts/Myths_Folktales or shall i make it http://www.aimpr.com/Arts/Myths-Folktales notice the last bit in there >> Myths_Folktales or Myths-Folktales and whats the drawback of using underscore in there if any and what are the plusses of using the hyphen if any or does it not make any difference atall? I see dmoz uses underscores but its pretty old now and ive seen new directories all use hyphens whats the reason behind? any suggestions would be appreciated.
What I mean is that some engines don't see underscore as a keyword separator. But hyphens or commas are recognized as separators. So Myths_Folktales could be meaningless for some engines but : "Myths-Folktales" or "Myth,Folktales" could help you ranking higher for those 2 keywords
Hyphens are best. You can prove it out yourself by conducting searches and seeing hyphens in some of the higher positions. Good luck.
I believe Google treats hyphens as spaces (or just word delimiters) and underscores as nothing. That's what I read somewhere (I think a sitepoint thread).
hyphens.... I switched from underscores a long time ago... still remember those days when I was trying to adjust to this unfair rule As a developer I was very used to underscores, but things had to change... I think even "," will give you better results than "_". You can always check the rules by going to big sites like "Amazon" or "Ebay", click on products and see what they use.... Oh... and please dont post in forums just to promote sites in your signature....
hyphens are even better than all one word. I tested this on a heavily SEO'd site. Somes pages were named domain.com/AllOneWord.htm and others were named domain.com/Not-One-Word.htm My referal logs indicate the hyphenated file names (keyword rich of course) get far more search traffic than the non-hyphenated.