Matt Cutts explains the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in a URL.
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2024 update please !
Also… Happy Diwali from India !! 🥳🥳
How do I best encode terms, which already contain dashes, like "Roland TB-303"? Is "roland-tb-303.html" better than "roland-tb303.html"?
who came from udemy course?
Q4 2019. Any SEO here has done the test yet? Search query never contains dash or hyphen or underscores.. so what would rank higher drjohnsmith.com or dr-john-smith.com for dr john smith query ?? thanks for anyone insight or link to answer.
please update !!!
Actually I am very curious, what does "underscores and dashes" mean in the YouTube video
sometimes I get links without underscores or dashes on the videos that I uploaded … sometimes I have 1 underscore … 2 underscores, or a combination of them
Thank you
It's February of 2019 as I write this comment. Is this actually still true? Any updates on this? (And my two cents: this is humans bending to technology, not technology serving humans. Not good nor reasonable)
It is interesting
2018 update please!
WHO KNOWS?
Could you tell me please, will it be good or bad if i'll redirect urls with underscore to urls with -dashes-?
thank you
i am not agree matt. (_)Underscore or (-)dash doesn't matter for wikipedia because wikipedia quality matter ok plz learn more matt cutt
Does anyone know what the best practice is for County and City-Specific website pages?
Example 1: http://www.brayoutdoor.com/los-angeles (which is what we currently use)
Example 2: http://www.brayoutdoor.com/losangeles (without the DASH)
When Matts says it's a word separator does he mean that the hyphens do NOT or DO string a search phrase together? I"m hoping the answer is DO. Example: Idaho-Potatoes If someone searches Idaho Potatoes will my hyphenated example be good for search ranking? Does Google rank Idaho separate and Potatoes separate as an unrelated search phrase if /Idaho-Potatoes used in the url?
I'm sorry but this needs to be fixed. Example: If I have two files in Google Drive: keyword-test and keyword_test. If I search for term "keyword" then I only get the keyword-test file back. I can never find the keyword_test file. For Google, a search company, this is pretty bad.
THIS ALSO EFFECTS SEARCHING IN GOOGLE APPS DRIVE! FILES WITH UNDERSCORE DOES NOT APPEAR IN THE SEARCH RESULT. Funny though they appear in Autocomplete but not later in the searchs result list. This is very disturbing and I cannot find any information that it will com a change and now we are writing 26 August 2015!
Is this logic still true?
Hello matt ,my site's URL was my_site_example_example/65656 ,like that and now my developer fix it and now it is site-example-example/65656 ……. so is there any problem to index by Google or any crawl problem ??
What if you don't use a hypen or an underscore? Is that bad?
Hahaha that's funny
thank you of the film;
had build about 40 websites with _ underscores_ years ago because that was the standard (learned method) and found out now that – dashes – separates the words. So I went back to change the sites with – dashes – and found my self in front of a lot of work; 1000s and 1000s of pages.
Leave it alone and spend your time on new pages and/or sites and not to risk the contamination of those sites that are already built; use dashes for your future site work.
PS If you have html pages that are important to the site; then spend the time but beware you my lose 100s of links.
Back up the site to a separate hard drive before you attempt to do this.
No mention of RFC 952?
Does that RFC not specify that hostnames can only contain letters, numbers, the minus sign and dots? http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc952.txt
RFC 1123 added the option of an initial digit, but did not mention allowing underscores. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1123.txt
Sadly, RFC 1178 (Choosing a name for your computer) does not mention RFC 952 or RFC 1123 or underscores.
HYPHENS, not dashes!
Hey wait, are you the same Matt Cutts from this article?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13530_3-9748779-28.html
Can you make up your mind already?
I have links to my site with both www prefix and without. Does google count both address as one and should domain www or Not to www ?
Spook, Matt is trying to explain the different uses of hyphens and underscores, they both have specific uses. Use hyphen if you want to increase the number of keyword derivatives that the page can appear, and underscores to set specific keyword combinations.
Besides that, Google doesn't want you thinking about increasing rankings, it wants you to increase the value and relevance of information on your site.
Thanks Matt! It's a very valuable piece of information for my company as I am working very hard at the moment on making our site visible to the right target audience. I do have a question though an answer to which I cannot seem to find anywhere.
When forming URLs for pages, does it make any difference if I use/do not use prepositions and other form words? For example, what would you say looking at:
mydomain.com/teach-your-child-to-swim-in-a-pool vs. mydomain.com/teach-child-swim-pool
Thanks Matt for the valuable instruction!!! Although dashes in the URls play a crucial role in the SEO prospect, it’s not recommended for the sites already have indexed on search engine. However, use dashes instead of underscores for new sites for better ranking impact.
Yes i agree. It is more of user experience.
Keep in mind that it is the search engines that should adapt to find good websites and not otherwise. Do thing right and they should find you.
Of course in practice, we cannot wait for Google to fix their low-priority tasks and we want to take advantage of every tiny bit of SEO.
Paradoxically with the historic reason, lot of developers are used to use underscore to separate keyword, so it is/was more likely that they use the same pattern to name their resource/filename.
However, with all the SEO talk, hyphen gained the popularity contest. Without that, we would see more underscore in URLs. Only potential valid reason for hyphen would be that it is easier to type/read for non-techy (?)
The correct word is "hyphen." A dash is two hyphens.
I was looking for the answer to which one was better UNDERSCORES vs DASHES and this video seemed to sum it up pretty quick. Matt indicates dashes are better but if you already have lots of URLS with underscores, don't bother to go back and change them. Thanks for the advice.
This old stuff is so much more informative than the videos you're putting out these days. Please bring back the good stuff 🙁
How relevant is this info to google/seo in 2013?
Spammers bought many popular non-underscored and non-hyphenated domains and are reselling them at a huge ransom.
Has this methodology or its impact in SEO ranking changed since 2011?
Dashes instead of underscores is a no-brainer. The real question is, dashes, or no dashes? In other words, is redwidgets better than red-widgets?
And does the correct answer (if there is one) depend on whether the dash or no dash term is in the domain itself, versus a folder or filename?
This should be a commandment for local businesses. Thank you to the wonderful person who created 301's…although if you use a CMS, you probably will never have this problem. Others. Just not this one.
why would I want to use _ when I can simply write twowordstogether?
I recommend just doing yoursite dot com/–_–.php
if I have to use hyphens, matt cutts needs to write in a straight line. deal?
Hi,
What do you think about using underscores for words that come together and hyphens for separate words?
Examples:
buy-low_cost-flight-tickets
all_inclusive-holidays