Comments on: Dashes vs. underscores

By: John

John — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 02:53:56 +0000

thank you for clarifying that. For some weird reasons, webmaster started to use _ for the site urls. Time to get them changed. thanks again

By: derek

derek — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:55:59 +0000

what about url’s that do not have dashes or underscores. Just spaces. Are they penalized or how do crawlers recognize them or how is page rank affected?

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:03:52 +0000

I just wondering if its works for all type of website …. but thanks for useful information

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 14:51:06 +0000

Thanks for the clarification Matt. It’s always great to get the info direct from someone who works for Google.

By: Man_Eating-Banana

Man_Eating-Banana — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 06:56:56 +0000

to dash or not to dash this is Esperanto.

Tim Acheson article link has this to say:

“Yet the rules for punctuation in friendly URLs should be a decision made by editorial and/or business people, not technical people.”

and this

“I believe that rogue dashes in URLs are a transient phenomenon. The technology will nature.”

In my view this sounds to me as an issue of backward compatibility.

If Google evolves to new ways of ranking pages, what about more interesting languages that have the ” ‘ ” in their words for proper sound and punctuation and meaning. As in “Metacafe” in spanish this is rather wrong. It is missing the ” ‘ ” after cafe.

It is clear that programmers are taking on a challenge by deciding to rank lower a page title with a dash or not, but I disagree with the use of statements like “rogue dashes” and I really disagree very much with “rules for punctuation in friendly URLs should be a decision made by editorial and/or business people”.

We are challenging universal nature, by recording it electronically, we are challenging our very universe by curving our existence and creating a new way of communication that is not natural so limiting our search engines to using dashes only or considering that it has not mature because of a dash fault is not helpful. Rather I like to think of the generosity of programmer when they use backward compatible technology to not leave the previous works in a “dash”.

Cafe’ sound about good right now.

By: Tim Acheson

Tim Acheson — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:03:37 +0000

I have given this a lot of thought over the years, and have reached the conclusion that dashes are not the best delimiter. Furthermore, I believe a consensus will emerge eventually with an alternative character being used universally — probably the underscore:

http://www.timacheson.com/Blog/2009/aug/friendly_url_should_not_use_dashes_to_represent_spaces

By: MRSA Treatment

MRSA Treatment — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:57:48 +0000

I’ve always preferred hyphens for page names – so it’s good that Google prefers them. I think it’s hard to see underscores, especially when viewed as a hyperlink – they blend in with the link. And thus other people can record your domain name incorrectly.

Goran – I totally agree with you – using hyphenated website names is not easy to get across to someone over the phone. People do not easily understand what a hyphen is. So, this is good to remember when choosing a new domain name.

Thanks for another excellent article Matt!

By: Sherry

Sherry — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:01:05 +0000

this is great information. But I have a question, do dashes work BETTER than regular strings of words that are not separated? I mean, can google see the separation there?

By: webtechnepal

webtechnepal — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:11:36 +0000

I prefer dashes.

By: j0rd

j0rd — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 19:55:03 +0000

I’ve recently re-indexed a PR6 site which gets quite a few hits.

My site structure was using Dashes, but I had a bug in my Apache-Rewrite which allowed these two URLs to link to the same content

One-Two.html
One_Two.html

While all the links on my site linked to One-Two.html and these got indexed by Google first…but after a recent browse of the stats, I’ve noticed that Google has replaced 90% of my URLs in the index with the improper and not linked to One_Two.html. Weird!

My URLs to make more sense as “One Two” rather than “One + Two” as they’re usually a name with multiple words in it. Maybe google understands this and prefers to joint the words with an underscore because of this, rather than a non-associative joiner like a dash.

I’ve gone ahead and 301′d the _ to – and we’ll see what happens, but I’m almost tempted to keep the _ which google seems to prefer.