Underscores vs. dashes in URLs

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?

please update !!!

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

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.

HYPHENS, not dashes!

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 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

Lovely. I hope you understand that calling anyone retarded makes you sound like one. Unless of course you're thirteen years of age or under. It's simple really. With dashes you lose the possibility to revert a friendly url back to it's exact original form as the dash character gets a double meaning (it can be a space or a dash). With underscore you don't lose that information.

Oh, and Google itself uses underscores in its urls. What's that about?

Reasons why underscore is better than hyphen to separate words in friendly urls: 1. It's much more readable 2. "Nineteenth- and twentieth‑century writers" becomes "Nineteenth--and-twentieth‑century-writers". In some languages, fe. finnish the hyphens are used extensively to join words together. (see Wikipedia article for hyphen for more examples) Being a finn, I'm not too happy about Google forcing me to use the ugly hyphens.

This is not the case on the web. See wikipedia for example. A search engine should be as accurate as possible. it should be fixed.

I don't think people should adapt to Google, but Google should find way to get the most out of content about real usage (and it probably does on most point). People should however do the "right" thing, and that is where I would support Google, but then I have to be convinced it is the "right" thing. ;-)

Idea to index the parts AND the sum (i.e. tmp, max, tmp_max for "tmp_max") is interesting. Idea to let the webmaster define how their website URL are defined are interesting for a "search engine" point of view (would prefer a global standard to define this, rather than Google only). I am sure, at least I hope, some people at Google have thought of these ideas already.