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What do search engines presently prefer us to use as word separators in URLs: dashes or underscores? Should I use http://example.com/dash-underscore or http://example.com/dash_underscore?

Mark Amery
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user331080
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3 Answers3

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Search engines tend to treat them differently. Google likes to treat two words joined by an underscore as a single word, but dashes are considered to be seperating puntuation. Try it out yourself!

I tried search for search_engine and search-engine. The first gave me pages and urls with that exact phrase, the second was a more general search, treating the dash - like a space.

Anthony
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A lot of the blog sites nowadays build URL slugs using dashes as opposed to underscores as it is a lot easier to read so I wouldn't be surprised if search engines score dashes higher on the results than underscores.

Gautam
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Use hyphens.

I have asked several SEO consultants and they always say to use hyphens in URLs for separate words. That seems in line with practices on most commons sites I've looked at.

ndp
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