SEO: Dash or Underscore in URLs

I just recommended to a friend, Dr. Jamie Fettig, that he change his web site URLs from ‘keyword1_keyword2′ to ‘keyword1-keyword2′.

Why?

Because according to Matt Cutts (a software engineer at Google), he recommends using dashes for Google. According to his article, “Dashes vs. underscores“, if you have a URL like ‘keyword1_keyword2′ Google will only return that page if the user searches for ‘keyword1_keyword2′ (which almost never happens).

If you have a URL like ‘keyword1-keyword2′, that page can be returned for the searches for ‘keyword1′, ‘keyword2′, and even “keyword1 keyword2″.

Don’t forget to inform Googlebot and other search engine crawlers that a page has moved to a permanent location by adding 301 redirects to your site’s .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 /old_directory http://www.example.com/new-directory

Redirect 301 /old_page.html http://www.example.com/new-page.html

Redirect 301 /old_directory/old_page.html http://www.example.com/new-directory/new-page.html

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