Hyphen or Underscore in your website URL?

[freelancerguy]

Hi guys, Should I use a Hyphen or an Underscore in my website URLs? I heard that using Hyphen is better for SEO, is it correct?
Please advice. Thanks.

 

[PTTed]

Years ago I believe I heard Matt Cutts explain this answer in detail. He said that it didn't matter at all. Google could decipher either.

I can't say with 100% certainty whether or not that is still true. However, I don't see any reason why someone would want to use the underscore instead of the hyphen. They hyphen is the standard accepted practice. So I would stick with that.

Plus, if you want someone to remember what your domain name is, do you think it would be easier for them to remember a dash or an underscore. I would think it would be a lot easier to remember the dash. So use a hyphen.

 

[elcidofaguy]

I personally think that you should not bother with either the use of hyphen or under score... That said you never see underscore used at all so I would avoid that like the plague as most people will not remember to add that when typing in a URL as well as remembering to add a hyphen coming in a close second in my opinion...

 

[Labored]

Most of webmasters prefer to register non-hyphenated domains, but content is the king of SEO. Your website's content should be unique.

 

[cwvps]

I believe it is best not to use either if you can do it. Names without both, including only words, are best remembered.

 

[Rajiv Singhi]

For good SEO practice as per google guidelines URL structure should be clean. As you said you want to use Hypehns and underscores in URL. It is fine with users but not for Google. In other words i must say users can understand the URL in hyphens and underscores but Google crawler Program can not understand the URL and so it leaves the URL.

So make URK structure clean...

Thanks

 

[PTTed]

For good SEO practice as per google guidelines URL structure should be clean. As you said you want to use Hypehns and underscores in URL. It is fine with users but not for Google. In other words i must say users can understand the URL in hyphens and underscores but Google crawler Program can not understand the URL and so it leaves the URL.

So make URK structure clean...

Thanks

Rajiv,

Can you point us to any evidence at all that what you say is true? You say that the Google crawler program cannot understand a URL with hyphens or underscores in it. That is not the case. Almost every website you visit has hyphens in the URL. Even this website does. And as you can see, there are many pages from this website indexed and cached in Google. If Google can cache the page, then it has successfully crawled the page. If Google can't crawl your pages, then it won't index most of them. Using hyphens in your URL structure is good practice. It is helpful for both users and for search engines.

 

[Rajiv Singhi]

Rajiv,

Can you point us to any evidence at all that what you say is true? You say that the Google crawler program cannot understand a URL with hyphens or underscores in it. That is not the case. Almost every website you visit has hyphens in the URL. Even this website does. And as you can see, there are many pages from this website indexed and cached in Google. If Google can cache the page, then it has successfully crawled the page. If Google can't crawl your pages, then it won't index most of them. Using hyphens in your URL structure is good practice. It is helpful for both users and for search engines.

Can you please read this and you will see the evidence... http://searchengineland.com/9-seo-quirks-you-should-be-aware-of-146465

 

[PTTed]

Can you please read this and you will see the evidence... http://searchengineland.com/9-seo-quirks-you-should-be-aware-of-146465

Good reference link. Thank you.
You did a poor job of explaining your viewpoint in your original post. The way you wrote it, I thought you meant that Google can't read hyphens or underscores at all. Obviously that is not what you meant to say. What you meant to say was that a person should use hyphens instead of underscores.

According to this Matt Cutts Video, if you are using underscores and your site is doing fine, then there is no reason to change. If you are starting a new site, there is a slight preference to using hyphens over underscores.