I go with dashes, mainly from a personal preference point of view. I was wondering, does anyone go for one or the other for any good reason, or are they equal?

I have been wanting to know this for ages. I prefer underscores, but for no good reason. Recently I was told that hyphens are better for SEO is that true or were they making it up?

I go with hyphens.  My main issue is that I have very poor eyesight and often don’t see underscores and see only a blank space.  Especially if a line is already underlined for some reason.  I don’t have any SEO reasons for this preference, a machine parser obviously won’t have vision issues. =)

Lisa Wess - 15 May 2008 10:13 AM

Especially if a line is already underlined for some reason.

I go with underscores as I do remember reading somewhere that these were better for SEO but nowadays everything I read says that it really doesn’t matter which you go with. Lisa I was just wondering what you meant by the above statement? In what instance would a url_title already be underlined?

Best wishes,

Mark

A hyperlink?

Duh!!! Stupid me!

I was thinking of the browser address bar!!

Going off to hide in the corner now!!

Best wishes,

Mark

I wrote a piece about this last year on my blog.

Despite what a lot of people say I go with underscores and there is a very good semantic reason for it. Hyphens are easier to see sure but there are situations where they do not make sense but underscores do.

I know I am out on a limb on this but I am convinced I am right.

Ingmar Greil - 15 May 2008 10:58 AM

A hyperlink?

But… but it’s not good manners to paste raw URLs onto a web page…!

Sorry to burst your bubble, McGehee. (This is “The Lounge”, right? Check.)

But McGehee has a point - having raw URLs isn’t good for SEO or user journey.

For example the link I threw in earlier is: http://www.simoncox.com/mt3/2006/06/dashes_vs_underscores.php

But on the page it is better to make the hyperlink descriptive of its destination:
Dashes or underscores

er - which I didn’t do earlier…

I see a lot of links - raw, usually, and I usually can’t see the underscore.  And yea, I can’t see it in my browser URL bar either, unless I squint or zoom.

So for me it’s an accessibility question; which is more important to me than SEO - what’s the point of SEO if people can’t read the stuff? =)

Lisa Wess - 15 May 2008 12:47 PM

What’s the point of SEO if people can’t read the stuff? =)

Definitely a very good point there!

Mark

Like Mark wrote in his first post, I also read that underscores were favored by search engines. But that was three years ago. Today, I don’t think it matters.  When I visit popular websites, I notice that some use dashes and some use underscores.

I can’t remember where I read this, but I do believe from an SEO perspective that hyphens are now very definitely the top choice, if only for Google. A quick example shows why I believe I am correct:

Search on Google for Expression Engine:

expression_engine - 8,220 results

expression-engine - 4,240,000 results

...and just for information, a plain old space between them:

expression engine - 3,300,000 results

So I would most definitely stick with hyphens.

You can’t beat a bit of research! I find that searching on expression-engine brought back the main EE site, but expression_engine did not. Seems Google treats the dash version as two words, but the underscore version as one word.

I shall be sticking with dashes too.

You guys do realize the program is called ExpressionEngine, no spaces.

Sure, it’s just a handy two worded name to use in this instance!

Dashes for me. People in the real world are used to dashes, and only use underscores when they’re typing and want to put a place for an answer to be filled in. Underscores scream “computer stuff” at me.

I use dashes for URL titles and underscore for templates and global variable names.

Personal preference. Dashes are easier to type in, no need to hold down the shift key.