Hyphens or Underscores in URL? Do What the Engines do.
Not long ago, in one of my "Searching for Truth" articles, I posted about the difference between and preference for using hyphens or underscores in a URL.
Quick recap: If a company sells Blue Widgets and they want to rank high for searches related to Blue Widgets, one of many techniques to use is to include the keywords in the URL. Which is more effective, an underscore (www.YourSite.com/Blue_Widgets) or a hyphen (www.YourSite.com/Blue-Widgets)? The question revolves around if an engine is more likely to see Blue_Widgets or Blue-Widgets as two distinct words.
I went into this topic in much more detail in this post, where I also stated my opinion.
While I posited my preference for underscores, a Google engineer named Matt Cutts clearly states that hyphens should be used.
Search engines keep their algorithms under lock and key. People like me often work like detectives to figure out the best ways to optimize sites, using all sorts of information as our guide.
One thing I rely on is simple observation of what the engines themselves do. Obviously they are going to optimize their own sites against their own algorithm.
For example: want to see if MSN Search uses meta tags? Just hop over to www.Microsoft.com and view the source code. Since the webmasters of Microsoft went to the trouble of adding meta tags, it's a safe bet that MSN Search reads them. (How they are factored into the ranking algorithm is another issue.)
So in the case of the hyphen/underscore debate, let's take a look at what Google does, which is highly revealing.
Matt Cutts says to use hyphens, yet on Google.com the underscore is in use. One needs to look no further than the home page:
The URL for the language tools is: http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en
Google's Advanced Search page: http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
If Google will use an underscore, then the algorithm must be able to determine that “language_tools” is two, distinct words. But then again, Google doesn’t worry about rankings for their own site. But they should follow their own advice, if that advice is truly important.
From my experience, I have seen no difference in results between an underscore and a hyphen. My guess is that it doesn't really matter from Google's perspective if you use hyphens or underscores, in the same manner that it rarely matters if you spell the search term correctly anymore. Google easy adjusts for our lazy spellings.
Some may prefer to do what Google says, but I would rather do what Google does. Or is this a case of do what I say, not what I do?
Technorati Tags: google, meta tags, msn search
