The Difference Between Dashes and Underlines in SEF URLs

You may have heard that Google and other search engines prefer that you use dashes or hyphens (-) instead of underlines or underscores (_) as word separators in your URLs. Google actually recommends that you use dashes or hyphens when creating search engine friendly or search engine optimized URLs instead of underscores. Here's why. 

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Google sees underlines or underscores as an actual underline character, so a PHP programmer searching for "similar_text" would get results about the PHP function similar_text() instead of all search results for "similar text". So the hyphens in SEF URLs tell Google that each word is a separate word, while underlines tell Google that your URL is one long word.

In a 2005 blog post, Matt Cutts of Google stated that hyphens are better for search engine optimization in URLs because of the Google developers' nerdy roots. According to the post, Google did not penalize sites for using hyphens in their URLs (which may or may not have meant that Google penalizes sites for using underscores in their URLs).

{cbauthor}Now obviously this is no longer completely the case. Google is continually refining its search engine and it is smart enough to parse URLs with dashes and/or underlines. People searching your content will be able to find your pages whether you use dashes or underscores. In fact, many top searches will return results whose URLs contain underlines.

But if you are ever in doubt with SEO, just do what Google suggests. In this case it means using hyphens or dashes instead of underlines or underscores.

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