13 thoughts on “Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?”

1. caseychesh April 10, 2009 at 1:04 pm

   first view!
2. pjeide April 10, 2009 at 1:09 pm

   Thanks Matt!
3. abfabmedia April 11, 2009 at 3:25 am

   That will help me point someone on the right track

   Thanks!

   David
4. pigsonthewinguk April 13, 2009 at 8:41 am

   People are already using underscores as separators, Google should honour that, rather then trying to specify what people should. use.
5. ontheflipside200 April 16, 2009 at 3:03 pm

   There was an article on cnet on Matt Cutts from google at WordCamp 2007′ proclaiming that google was using underscores as separators.
   just google cnet underscore word separators.

   Why the preference for dashes when it seems there is no difference?
6. GoogleWebmasterHelp April 16, 2009 at 4:30 pm

   @ontheflipside200: Matt clarified what he said at WordCamp on his blog on August 10, 2007. Try searching for [Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers] and that should bring it up.

   - Wysz, Google Webmaster Central
7. ontheflipside200 April 16, 2009 at 10:14 pm

   Thanks for the clarification.
8. dushyant78 April 23, 2009 at 4:47 pm

   I totally agree. Sometimes its a technical challenge, depending on what platform your site is coded in. When you have a large number of high ranking pages, that all follow different URL patterns but use underscores instead of hyphens, there should be no reason to change your site to use hyphens. I have personally seen cases where doing permanent redirects as a method of passing rankings along from an old page to new page are highly ineffective with regards to preserving SERP rankings.
9. somfplease April 27, 2009 at 12:09 am

   underscores make things easier to read in a url especially if posted as a link.

   mouseover “QuickList” or “Account” at the top on this page (if logged in). Doesn’t google own youtube?
10. larssonk22 May 12, 2009 at 10:17 am

    I don’t think Google needs to worry about their own sites since they own the search engine. + I’m unsure how much of the internal link structure has changed after the Google buy out.
11. viperpray August 31, 2009 at 3:32 am

    nice eye
12. brodseba September 16, 2009 at 2:39 pm

    I know a lots of site use underscore in their URL. It make sense to me than Google treat underscore has a separator. Please, pretty please.
13. gooadam September 28, 2009 at 1:36 pm

    I find this odd to state hyphens as a preferred separator. Google had no problems with underscores at the outset, but hyphens were originally used predominantly by “spammy” bot-created sites. Just for logic sake, wouldn’t you put more weight on the underscore knowing this info, if it were up to you?

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