I just started working with a new chiropractic clinic building some backlinks and had a chance to give some feedback to the owner about a website he had had constructed by another company. One of the things that struck me was the fact that most of his URL names used underscores and not hyphens. I knew from experience that hyphens were IN and underscores were OUT, but I had never really investigated why. Here is a quick synopsis of what I found…
Take a look at the URL for this page. If you are viewing it on the original post page then the URL is http://andreakropp.com/underscores-versus-hyphens-in-webpage-urls. Why not http://andreakropp.com/underscores_versus_hyphens_in_webpage_urls? It seems just as legible, so is this a matter of personal preference?
No. Search engines actually treat them differently.
The hyphen is viewed as a space between words, while the underscore is its own character such as the letter U.
When the search engine sees http://andreakropp.com/underscores-versus-hyphens-in-webpage-urls, it sees the distinct words “underscore”, “versus”, “hyphen”, “webpages” and “urls”. “In” is ingored. (Sorry Indiana).
When the search engine sees http://andreakropp.com/underscores_versus_hyphens_in_webpage_urls it is as if it sees “underscoresUversusUhyphensUinUwebpageUurls”. The underscore is treated like a text character that mashes the words into a indecipherable mess.
Google and other search engines have release statements about this and seem to working toward making the underscore on par with the hyphen, but it hasn’t happened yet. You only need to look at the actual search results for the queries “little_red_riding_hood” vs “little-red-riding-hood” vs “little red riding hood”. The version with underscores has only about 1/10th the number of results returned.
The final verdict…when in doubt hypenate!