Underscores and Hyphens: Try Not Making Sense!
Maybe you are in the position where you have to chosse how URLs should be. Not that long ago underscores were fine, and hyphens were also great. Things have changed and might change again, it’s just how things are, and google is also like that, it’s changes !
August 2005: Matt Cutts was writing : “So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.
July 2007: Matt Cutts announces at the WordPress Wordcamp that underscores are now treated as spaces in Google.
September 2009 : Matt Cutts explains: “it does make a difference, I would go with dashes or Hyphens if you can, if you have underdscores and things are working fine for you, I would not worry about changing the architecture. A while ago, I said we’re looking at using underscores as separators and the reason we typically never talk about stuff in the future, is that it gives us the freedom to change our mind.”
Should you use Underscores or Hyphens with URLs ?
In one word and if you have a choice to make : Hyphens.
But give google the freedom to change their minds about underscore anytime (soon) . -°)
Related articles:
- Dashes vs. underscores
- Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?
- Google’s Treatment of Underscores vs Hyphens – The Confusion
- Google Still Not Treating Underscores As Word Separators
- I thought underscores were the same as hyphens these days?
- Google test hyphen and underscore