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SEO, To Hyphen or Underscore URLs Revisited

Posted by brant on March 5, 2010 . 16 Responses

I’ve seen a lot of SEO Experts and many SEO tools recommend that you should be using hyphens in URLs rather than underscores, one example was Ann Smarty over at SearchEngineJournal.  For the disadvantages of the underscore in URLs she says:

Traditionally it isn’t seen by search engines as a word separator (this is slowly changing now)

Slowly changing?  It was reported in 2007 that Google and other search engines treat underscores like hyphens.  To say it’s slowly changing is like saying Facebook is finally catching on.  Three years on the web is an eternity.  She also says that there are no disadvantages to hyphens.  Though I’m not so sure about that. . .

Think about multiple ways that hyphens are used.  Hyphens are added in-between words and in people’s names.  For example, Maurice Jones-Drew of the Jaugars has a name with a hyphen.  Let me give you an example of a potential sentence that includes his name:

website.com/Maurice-Jones-Drew-has-all-star-week

Now if we use underscores it would look like this:

website.com/Maurice_Jones-Drew_has_all-star_week

Slightly different meaning in both of those URLs, wouldn’t you agree?  It is also much easier to read with underscores.  Therefore the BEST option is underscores because people rarely use them when it comes to typing names or phrases.  There is no way they will get in the way.

I know what your saying, I’m preaching to use underscores when this blog uses hyphens.  Wordpress uses them by default (though I’m not sure why and I never changed it)  Though I have used underscores on other projects….  Check out Jones-Drew’s page at FantasySP.com.

I don’t mean to single out Ann because she certainly knows her SEO, but this issue just keeps popping up every now and then and it truly annoys me.  It needs to be squashed once in for all.

UPDATE: In the comments below, Kieron Hughes provides a link to Matt Cutts suggesting to use hyphens.  I guess I stand corrected.

Do you guys agree with me or am I being too nit picky?


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  • jimrudnick

    Something to think about, eh? Will look over our clients listings and see….and thanks for this hypothesis too!

    :-)

    Jim

  • http://webtoastie.co.uk/ Kieron Hughes

    Personally I disagree.

    If you have a link that has underscores in, then they can often by misinterpreted in certain instances.

    For example. If my website contained underscores and I posted it on a forum, then that link would most likely be underlined due to default CSS styling. Now when somebody looks at that link, they won't be able to tell it has underscores because they blend in with the underlined styling of the link.

    If (for whatever reason) somebody decides to type the URL into the address bar (as opposed to clicking on the link/copying and pasting) then they may well just ignore the underscores as they can't see them – meaning the link won't work.

    In terms of clarity I think it's much better to use hyphens.

  • http://x-pose.org/ Brant Tedeschi

    I see what your saying. Though I don't think that will be an issue.

    A lot of forums and some blog comments tend to shorten a URL so it fits on one line anyway. So it would look like this:

    http://www.fantasysp.com/playe…7342

    Whether you are using hyphens or underscores, it's not going to matter.

  • http://webtoastie.co.uk/ Kieron Hughes

    Regardless of how URLs look, hyphens are much better for SEO – as explained by Matt Cutts at Google:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k

  • http://x-pose.org/ Brant Tedeschi

    Wow, surprised to hear him say that. I guess that debate is over.

  • http://www.markrushworth.com/ mark rushworth

    its a case of using underscores means re-educating the general public to use this in place of hyphens, its just not going to happen.

  • http://www.seosmarty.com/ Ann Smarty

    Only one thing to clarify. Please read carefully what I've said in the post “Slowly changing” referred to search engines in general, not Google in particular. Do you have any evidence that ALL search engines treat underscore and hyphen the same way? – Exactly, so “slowly” was the way to emphasize that hyphens are the safer way to go because they are *traditionally* treated as the word separator.

  • http://www.jfknet.com SEO

    I've always used hyphens, and see no real reason to change, but it's always interesting to see all viewpoints.

  • http://www.gogoguitars.com/ guitar lessons

    hahahahah, Underscores, what is this 1984? I personally would like to use only what matters for SEO. I can see the point that underscores actually interfere with the underlining of the link but what about other delimiters? I don't want to use slashes, I want all my pages to be for example: http://www.gogoguitars.com/online-guitar-lessons rather than something else, ideally though I would like to have a way to separate the parts of the URL

  • http://www.thaiteepak.com/travel.html สถานที่ท่องเที่ยว

    Thanks for your useful info, I think it's a good topic

  • Guest

    The source you cited is incorrect. The article you link to in your post is from August 2, 2007, and it references comments made by Matt Cutts of Google.

    Matt clarified his comments on August 10, 2007 in his blog:

    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/

    “If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says some people thought that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.”

    Keep in mind that was 2007, and as you point out that was a long time ago. But I haven't been able to find any concrete info on dashes and underscores being treated euqally, as of November 1, 2010. So I'm sticking with dashes for now.

  • http://www.webdesignmauritius.info Web-Design-Mauritius

    I am currently using both on a project.

  • Anonymous

    A lot of forums and some weblog comments tend to shorten a URL so it fits on one line anyway. So it would look like this.

    Motorcycle Parts

  • http://reviewrage.com Richard Wolf

    I am the webmaster of http://reviewrage.com and I fell in love with the idea of using underscores instead of the traditional hyphen to separate words in URLs (the pioneer in me maybe). I quickly made a change to hyphens and my keywords are ranking much better now. I have a specific example of why to avoid underscores and to use hyphens instead.

    http://reviewrage.com/madden_11
    http://reviewrage.com/madden-11

    When typing “review rage madden 11″ in Google, the madden_11 (underscored) version is no where to be found. However the madden-11 (hyphenated) version is 2nd in the rankings. Stick with hyphens and do not worry so much about bad grammar in your URLs.

  • http://profiles.google.com/simaadigor seer weer

    I have seen lots of SEO Specialists and plenty of SEO tools recommend that you ought to be using hyphens in URLs than underscores, example was Ann Smarty over at Search Engine Journal.

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  • Anonymous

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