What is the best to use - or _ in google ?

What is the best to use?

For example:

www.promopens.com/bic-pens

or

www.promopens.com/bic_pens


Thanks in advance

 

if im not mistaken matt cutts says "-"

 

Who is Matt Cutts ??

 

Highly respected SEO expert (google engineer)

 

You may find this useful:

Dashes vs Underscores for words in urls.

 

I didnt read the link in sachin410's post, but i'm going to guess that it says "-" is better.. 'cause it is..

 

I do think "-" is better, that's what I use for all my sites. But it's interesting to note that wikipedia uses "_" and ranks extremely high.

 

Agreed, I think "-" is recognisd as both a word seperator and possible hythenated word whereas "_" is really only a word seperator. Meaning "-" is more powerful, being indexed for 2 possible search situations.

 

I think that google treat _ as " " and "-" as seperator , so - "-"
but thats what i think

 

- is best because google totally ignores it and you get maximum value of your keywords

 

Ive had most luck with "-".....
Just my 2 cents

 

I don't have any problems with _

 

To be explicit, if you use a dash google just indexes the
words around it, which is what you want.

If you use an underscore then google will index the
two works with underscore as one word, which you don't
want, unless your customers are searching for two words
connected by an underscore.

Best regards
wiz

 

Looks like the argument here indicates "-" is the winner.
It sure is going to help me too thank you guys.

 

Anyway this is wrong, well at least in my case I use _ and google index one word, a phrase and maybe even something more haha I don't know ... I think it really isn't that important for SE as it is your personal thing .... Yes I know about the articles around _ vs - thing and maybe it is better if you use - but I really don't see any problems with people finding my site the way you described this in your post !

 

This is correct.

 

I don't quite understand this ... can you explain minstrel in more plain english ... if I understand corectly google will index "some-keyword" this way : some, keyword and some keyword while _ some other way ?

 

alpha-beta is spidered as two words: alpha and beta

alpha_beta is spidered as one word: alpha_beta

In reality, it does not make a huge difference one way or another but there is a slight advantage to using alpha-beta.

 

I use _ on my history site and people find me using one word, two words and even phrases from url .... am I missing something here ?

 

Yes.

PageRank Information

http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html

Now, as an example, look at the highlighted words AND HIGHLIGHTED PORTIONS OF WORDS in this Google search example.