Seo Friendly Naming Conventions : Underscores vs Dashes

Underscores or Dashes which one is better to use for websites. It is a topic of discussion among many webmasters and they have different choices. Some believes it is better to use underscores and others prefer to use dashes or hyphen.

Webmasters have their own views about why to use underscore or dashes. Some webmasters believe that using underscore is better choice because of two reasons:

• The first being that underscores make the file name easier to read.
• Secondly it means that I can use hyphenated words correctly in file names.

However it points out as a result of discussions in the SEO communities, and also at Google's Matt Cutts blog, that dashes or hyphens are better choice than underscores in file names hence the Underscores Vs Dashes debate.

Matt Cutts said that Google reads underscores as part of the word and that the dash is seen as a separator. This would mean that "co-pilot" is read as "co" and "pilot" by Google and "co_pilot" is read as a single word "co-pilot".

Michael Wyszomierski from Google's Search Quality also described in a post at Google webmaster blog about dashes and underscores.

He said, "In general, we break words on punctuation, so if you use punctuation as separators, you're providing Google a useful signal for parsing your URLs. Currently, dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not. Keep in mind our technology is constantly improving, so this distinction between Underscores and Dashes may decrease over time. Even without punctuation, there's a good chance we'll be able to figure out that bigleopard.html is about a "big leopard" and not a "bigle opard." While using separators is a good practice, it's likely unnecessary to place a high priority on changing your existing URLs just to convert underscores to dashes."

In this way dashes in URLs are considered as separators and using separators is a good practice but it will be not right choice to change your existing URLs just for converting underscores in to dashes as technology is constantly improving, so distinction between underscores and dashes may decrease over time.

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