Thread

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. =)

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.

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? =)

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.