dashes vs underscores in url for SEO ~ Books I Like

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

dashes vs underscores in url for SEO

Which parameter is a better separator for words in a URL for SEO purposes?
a) hyphens/dashes (-)
b) underscores (_)

There is none other to answer this question other than Matt Cutts. Infact one of matt cutts responses clarifies it in a nutshell "if you already have a system set up to do underscores and have links/rankings, it’s probably not worth changing things over. But if you’re starting on a new domain, I’d go with dashes." In this post Matt describes in detail of how google treats dashes and underscores and atleast as of now dashes is a better choice for Google!

Some more results about google based on SERP counts

1. Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for george washington, George Washington, and gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN will all return the same results.
2. _ < & are treated like letters/numbers, not word separators
3. Google thinks ? [ ] ` { } are treated like spaces separating words
4. ‘ . / = \ are treated like spaces separating words if they are within quotes. If they are not inside quotes, they are treated as if they are spaces and are inside quotes.

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