After Matt Cutts came out and said that dashes were better than underscores for ranking I have had a few people ask me to change their CMS systems to which I have said NO to. Now it’s not that I disagree with Matt, searches like HTTP_PROXY_CONNECTION, HTTP_USER_AGENT,
HTTP_REFERER or HTTP_COOKIE which I find myself searching more than things like “Which is better underscores or dashes” then I understand why Google should not class the underscore as a space or a word delimiter.. but
Dave
13 Comments
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We always use dashes to separate words in file names – for example security-services.php . However with an established site, where it would be of less benefit to change the file names we just wouldn’t change them. I also prefer dashes to underscores in domain names because of the ‘radio test’ (would it sound good on the radio?) and also it can be confusing when written down – especially in if hand written.
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Thanks for sharing..
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I see you are also a fan of Fireshot eh?
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I’m not sure what this proves. It doesn’t even illustrate much, just that sites using underscores in URLs rank for 1 particular query. It is simple to find exceptions like that…. the point is a GENERALLY SPEAKING point that dashes are better.
I could go on for ages but this entire article makes almost completely no sense, that is, if you intended for it to have any value.
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what dataset would you like to play in I have data
Dave
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Plenty of places now completely ignoring spacer characters nowadays… Has the importance of a decent page name dropped? I’m not too sure!
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[...] Underscores or dashes? It has been a long time perplexing question that really seems to depend on which one you prefer to see. Matt Cutts, the man with four “T’s” in his name, said that dashes work best. Everyone rushed to change from underscores to dashes, just because the right-hand man of God, sorry… Google, said so. Hmmm… Maybe he was right, but then again… http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/which-is-better-underscores-or-dashes.html [...]
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I brought this up before on Sphinn, way early last year and was pretty badly burned for stating that underscores were on a par with dashes, since then I’ve always went doen the dash route, although pages before my sphinn 3rd degree burns were administered are still ranking bloomin’ well (soz for using the ‘b’ word on your blog Dave).
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Well now I’m confused… I’ve always seen everyone use dashes because it makes the page look like it’s a static page located somewhere but organised because the words between the dashes look like folders under which the page is located… I’ve even seen plus signs and hyphens used as url delimiters… So which should we use ? Is it irrelevant to SERP ?
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The dashes being better is more pronounced in Bing and Yahoo, though both recognise the underscore as a word seperator.
As an ASP developer I never even contemplated using underscores, that seems to have come from the PHP/C/Java side of things.
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But why Matt using dashes?
Technically that second highlighted result uses both (/domain-registration/) so when you count MC’s listing it’s nearly a tie