Which is best to use and why?

[MissMandy]

Which of the following is best to use and why?

my-domain/which-is-best

or

my-domain/which_is_best

[Chris]

#1

More software will parse the keywords

[MayaLocke]

Which of the following is best to use and why?

my-domain/which-is-best

or

my-domain/which_is_best

Hyphens are far better than underscores!

[Mr. Pink]

I've been using underscores on all my sites. I am not going to change these pages, but will start using dashes in the future.

Out of curiosity, what it the problem with underscores?

[Chris]

Google doesn't like them much, for many years they wouldn't parse them.

[Mr. Pink]

If you don't mind, let me see if I understand correctly.

So, if I have a page perfectly optimized for "organic cat food" and the file name of the page is organic_cat_food.html then Google looks at my page content but completely ignores the file name. But if I had named my fine organic-cat-food.html then Google would take the file name into account, in addition to the content on the page.

Is that it?

[Chris]

That was it, up until recently (like a year ago), supposedly now Google does parse underscores correctly.

They were always the odd man out in this, but they're the 800 pound gorilla.

Still, I would rather be safe than sorry. So I would still use hyphens.

[Mr. Pink]

OK, I understand. Now I have a dilemma what to do with existing sites. My guess is that I should leave the old sites alone, as many of the internal pages are linked form other sites.

But I have a few new sites and this whole thing about underscores bring up an issue about one site in particular.

A couple of months ago I launched a parody site National Center for Irresponsible Gambling, just for fun. To my surprise I soon started getting all these hits form Yahoo, for a whole bunch of key phrases that I feel are quite competitive. I use the AXS tracking scrip and see how visitors find me. I noticed that a lot of very competitive key phrases rank on the first page of Yahoo, often right on top. And I also noticed that this is not always the case with Google.

In light of this new information, could my lower Google rank be because I use underscores for file names?

And, since this is a new site, should I change all the underscores to hyphens, or do I risk loosing Yahoo rank?

[JasonCase24]

I've heard it's better to use dashes than underscores cause search engine can read it much better than the latter. You can do some research through Google to find out more about the benefit of dashes.

[risahe]

Hyphens are far better than underscores!

I agree this opinion

[Mr. Pink]

OK, the last two posters basically say that they agree with the use of dashes, which has already been established above. I do appreciate the feedback, but I was also hoping that I would get an opinion on my more specific questions form my last post.

Basically, if you ready my last post I explain that my new site ranks better with Yahoo than with Google. The question is, could this be due to the use of underscores?

And this leads to the next question. Since this is a new site, should I change all the underscores to dashes, or am I risking to lose the great Yahoo rank if I do that?

[Mr. Pink]

...actually, I just decided to change all the underscores into dashes, so my last question is now irrelevant.

But I'd still like to know if anyone thinks that the site is ranking lower of Google results due to the underscores. Or is it irrelevant now that Google did decide to parse underscores?

[susan.powell]

This is amazing. I was going to ask this very question and here it was! Thank you.

[Blue Cat Buxton]

...actually, I just decided to change all the underscores into dashes, so my last question is now irrelevant.

But I'd still like to know if anyone thinks that the site is ranking lower of Google results due to the underscores. Or is it irrelevant now that Google did decide to parse underscores?

Because of Chris's advice to use hypens I have always used them in my urls, (this is going back several years), but Google does definately now parse them - look at Wikipedia for example, their urls use underscore and they show up well in Google (some may say too well )

[Mr. Pink]

So, in conclusion, if I understand correctly, I should definitely not change my older sites around. They've always showed up well on Google searches, even with underscores, and now that Google parses underscores I am concluding that changing things around would just not help anything (possibly just hurt me in the short term).

Thanks...