Underscores or hyphens in the URL, does it make a difference? my-page vs my_page?

by admin on October 15, 2009

It does make a difference; I would go with dashes/hyphens, if you can. If you have underscores and things are working fine with you, I wouldn’t worry about changing your architecture.

A while ago I said, we’re looking at using underscores as separators, and reason why we typically never talk about stuff in the future, is that it gives us a freedom to change our mind.

In fact, the people who were working on that project, worked on a something slightly different for scoring in the URL, that was actually higher impact and a much higher win.

We might still get around to that, thanks for the question. I’ll ask some folks on our quality triage team ‘Hey, can we take a fresh look at this?’.

For the time being, dashes/hyphens are treated as separators and underscores are not. That might change in the future, but that’s the way it stands right now.

Related posts:

  1. Does Google have any suggestions (or data) on the impact of pipes versus dashes in the title tag?
  2. Does stripping file extensions from URLs (site.com/folder/page.html versus site.com/folder/page) have demonstrable benefit in the SERPs?

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