Hyphens in URLs - Are Hyphens in URLs Good or Bad for SEO

[sunilkumarbh]

Hyphens in URLs - Are Hyphens in URLs Good or Bad for SEO

[mjtaylor]

Hyphens are fine for SEO. They are preferable to underscores. They are not necessary for Google. Google and most SEs can read a word even if there is no space.

[MayaLocke]

It has been my experience that hyphens have been helpful for SEO.

[industriousfoe201]

Yes there was another thread on this but hyphens are read as spaces so they are just fine for search engines, while underscores are not read as spaces and may not give good keyword results.

[chrisdee]

There is so much controversy regarding the use of hyphens, with the majorty of people preferring no hyphens. From my experience using up to two hyphens has made no difference to my sites rankings

[pavionjsl]

Have have a number 1 ranked site using hyphens, no issues.

[kpmedia]

My favorite example of pro-hypen is expertsexchange.com.
Do you see it? Google does (or least has in the past) -- expert sex change instead of experts exchange.
Watch for double meanings! Yikes!

The problem comes with splogs. "best-cheap-whatever-for-sale.domain-about-something.com"
Don't do that.

[poker--888]

i was worried that may be google forbid to crawl my site but thanks to you. you make me :)

[John]

My favorite example of pro-hypen is expertsexchange.com.
Do you see it? Google does (or least has in the past) -- expert sex change instead of experts exchange.I am sure that is how they got so popular, clever was it not? :)

[C.Rebecca]

Google recommend to use hyphens instead of underscores... Google see each hyphened word as individual word.
e.g. For URL www.A-B-C, Google will give result for A, B and C...
On the other hand for www.A_B_C, Google will give result for A B C.
Use 3-5 words in URL otherwise your URL will lose the weight.

[John]

Google recommend to use hyphens instead of underscores... Google see each hyphened word as individual word.
e.g. For URL www.A-B-C (http://www.A-B-C), Google will give result for A, B and C...
On the other hand for www.A_B_C (http://www.A_B_C), Google will give result for A B C.
Use 3-5 words in URL otherwise your URL will lose the weight.You cannot use underscores in domain names at all, it is just not possible even if you wanted to.
The only place you can use them is in file or folder names.

[Almo99]

Hyphens are okay but you want people to remember your site name. Having an easy to remember domain name is important.

[MetaSEO]

Hyphens in URLs - Are Hyphens in URLs Good or Bad for SEO

Actually, I would recommend you use only hyphens. Hyphens are known by search engines as word separators. They seem to understand hyphens better than underscores.

[NickTyler81]

Also if you use underscore between the words in an underlined live link it gets lost and looks like an actual space. probably niot bad for the engines but could be bad for users trying to remember your URL?

[LD]

I am sure that is how they got so popular, clever was it not? :)

What about bobsexcavation.com? :shock:

[LD]

It has been my experience that hyphens have been helpful for SEO.

Helpful for SEO, how?

[SuperMan]

Hyphen are fine for SEO however, I would rather not use them. But I do own many sites with 1 or 2 hyphens that rank well. I would not use more than 2 hyphens. But do beware that many people view URLs with hyphen as sort of spammy...

[Macsheen]

Using hyphen in the url is always seo friendly. Use hyphens instead of underscores. Please see this Google suggestion to know more about url structures.
google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329

[deepsand]

Google recommend to use hyphens instead of underscores... Google see each hyphened word as individual word.
e.g. For URL www.A-B-C, Google will give result for A, B and C...
On the other hand for www.A_B_C, Google will give result for A B C.
Use 3-5 words in URL otherwise your URL will lose the weight.
You seem to be confused.

You say that "Google see each hyphened word as individual word." You also say the its sees A-B-C as A, B and C, which are also individual words!

In fact, quickly performed tests show that Google easily parses Word1Word2Word3, Word1-Word2-Word3, and Word1_Word2_Word3 into Word1 Word2 Word3.

Do searches for pennstateticketman, penn-state-ticket-man, and penn_state_ticket_man, and note that in each case the top organic listing is for Penn State Ticket Man.

Also note that, further down on each of the 3 SERP pages is a match on PennStateTicketMan.

[deepsand]

hmmmm...interesting. URLs in my site using underscores. It is too late for me to go back and change underscores to hyphens.
Don't worry; that's not a problem.

See my post, directly above yours, demonstrating that they are treated equally in query strings.

[ErickMolina]

Hyphens in URL's have always been good. They are also a good alternative for keyword rich domains that are taken. Sometimes the domain with the hyphen is available.

[CeceMHill]

Agreed. We have run some A-B tests and have found that hypens are much better indexed by Google.

[deepsand]

Agreed. We have run some A-B tests and have found that hypens are much better indexed by Google.
Please elaborate as to the particulars of such tests.

[CeceMHill]

I didn't personally run the test, but basically it was starting with two similar domain names on new sites with almost identical content. One was using test-domain-name.com the other was test_domain_name.com. The hyphened url was indexed faster and got more hits right away than the other one. I will talk to the tech who ran the test to see if there is better information that I can give.

[deepsand]

Not only is time-to-index not of critical import to the matter at hand, it is not the case that such would be in any way affected by the particular character string(s) employed in static URLs.

[deepsand]

The 2011 seoMoz Search Engine Ranking Factors report is out, and contains some interesting data re. the subject here being discussed.

Page Level Keyword Agnostic Features — Correlated Data (http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-8) shows the following:

Underscore in URL - 0.02
Hyphen in URL - negative 0.04


This means that, while the presence of an underscore in a URL gave it a small upward boost in the SERPs, the presence of a hyphen gave it doubly large downward push!

While these correlation coefficients are admittedly small, they certainly stand to counter the claims that hyphens are superior to underscores, and the underscores are in some way problematic.

[LD]

...but don't chose hyphen domain because Google will mark it as SPAM

Really? I'd like to see proof of this remark.

[vuxuanhung]

Really? I'd like to see proof of this remark.

I tested on 2 sites. In fact, the purpose of hyphen is to make your domain become keywords today. Google is smarter than you think.

[deepsand]

I tested on 2 sites. In fact, the purpose of hyphen is to make your domain become keywords today. Google is smarter than you think.
Bull feathers. Google does not visibly "mark" sites as "SPAM;" they simply banish them from the SERPs.

There are and will continue to be countless hyphenated DNs that rank quite well.

Did you bother reading this thread? Did you perform the quick & easy test presented at post #19 (http://www.webproworld.com/webmaster-forum/threads/98772-Hyphens-in-URLs-Are-Hyphens-in-URLs-Good-or-Bad-for-SEO?p=566062&viewfull=1#post566062) which demonstrates that Google parses hyphens and underscores identically and with ease.

Have you researched any of the similar tests run by various parties over the years that demonstrate the same?

[LD]

I tested on 2 sites. In fact, the purpose of hyphen is to make your domain become keywords today

So what has that got to do with the price of eggs??? Your statement here has no bearing on your previous post and reference that URLs with hyphens are noted as spam by G.


Google is smarter than you think.
Again, no bearing on the topic or your previous post.

[vuxuanhung]

Ok, "mark". I want to use "mark" to amplify the impact of hyphens in Panda algorithm

[deepsand]

Ok, "mark". I want to use "mark" to amplify the impact of hyphens in Panda algorithm
I'm going to go out on a very short limb here, and say that you've not done the necessary rigorous statistical analysis necessary for determining that which you claim.

To repeat, "spam" doesn't get "marked," but banished from the SERPs. And, the presence of very many highly ranked hyphenated DNs rebuts your claim.

[merlot105]

Hyphens are fine for SEO. They are preferable to underscores. They are not necessary for Google. Google and most SEs can read a word even if there is no space. Agreed to a certain degree. Matt Cutts specifically states that hyphens are preferable to underscores in separating words. An underscore is not considered a delimeter to Google, but rather, part of the word. For instance, google perceives March_Madness as one word. If you were to search "March_Madness" you will get a totally different result set (with URLs containing "March_Madness" ranking higher) than if you searched "March-Madness", which is equivalent to "March Madness".

[deepsand]

An underscore is not considered a delimeter to Google, but rather, part of the word. For instance, google perceives March_Madness as one word. If you were to search "March_Madness" you will get a totally different result set (with URLs containing "March_Madness" ranking higher) than if you searched "March-Madness", which is equivalent to "March Madness".
Had you bothered reading this dead thread in full before posting, you would know that Google parses all of March_Madness, March-Madness, and MarchMadness into March Madness.

Matt Cutts does not always know what he's talking about.

[merlot105]

@deepsand Sorry, I did not know this thread was dead. I'm not claiming I read every single post on this and I'm also not claiming that Matt Cutts "knows it all". However, he does know one or two things and he usually knows the things he talks about. Also, saying that March_Madness is parsed into March Madness is incorrect. Yes, Google is smart enough to know what your general search is with or without the underscore. However, because the underscore is often used in programming languages, and people actually search things like "FTP_BINARY" (just an example), Google needs to use the underscore as part of the query, not as a delimeter. Hence, when you search for "March_Madness", Google will give more value to websites that contain the exact term "March_Madness" in the content, URL, etc.

If you do a search on Google for "March_Madness", you will see that the results are slightly different from "March-Madness" or "March Madness", with Wikipedia's page (which has "March_Madness" in the URL) ranked first.

[morestar]

I can't disagree with deepsand and have found, with one of my older sites that underscores never ever mattered and to date, the site is in the top three in the search results. For over 5 years it's been #1 and #2 but I haven't touched it and many pages that rank high on it have underscores in the file names.

No worries.

[merlot105]

@morestar: I'm not disagreeing that your pages with an underscore can rank well. My point is that your site will (more than likely) rank higher for "keyword1_keyword2" then it would for "keyword1 keyword2" in most cases. I'm just saying that "keyword1_keyword2" and "keyword1 keyword2" will return a slightly different result set, because of how Google uses the underscore. On the other hand "keyword1-keyword2" is the same as "keyword1 keyword2" because in Google's eyes, the dash is just used to separate the two keywords. Anyway, this is a moot point because the results are very very similar. Google obviously doesn't put that much emphasis on it, and web developers shouldn't either.

[deepsand]

@deepsand Sorry, I did not know this thread was dead.
There was a red message on each page warning that it was inactive for 2 or more months, advising not to post to it.


@deepsandAlso, saying that March_Madness is parsed into March Madness is incorrect.
That it is so parsed has been amply demonstrated.


@deepsandHowever, because the underscore is often used in programming languages ...
As a substitute for a "blank", so as to tell the parser that a series of words so separated are part of a single entity rather than discrete entities. And, the underscore is not the only character that was of used.

Cutts is a youngster, who has no personal memories of the days when such kludges were first needed, and thus misspeaks on the matter.


@deepsandHence, when you search for "March_Madness", Google will give more value to websites that contain the exact term "March_Madness" in the content, URL, etc.
Setting aside the fact that Google no longer faithfully treats double-quoted query strings as requiring an exact match, the fact remains that the unquoted strings March_Madness, March-Madness, and MarchMadness are parsed into March Madness.


If you do a search on Google for "March_Madness", you will see that the results are slightly different from "March-Madness" or "March Madness", with Wikipedia's page (which has "March_Madness" in the URL) ranked first.
That they are only "slightly" different stand to evidence the parsing as I've described. If such strings were not so parsed, the SERPs would be very, very different.

[deepsand]

My point is that your site will (more than likely) rank higher for "keyword1_keyword2" then it would for "keyword1 keyword2" in most cases. I'm just saying that "keyword1_keyword2" and "keyword1 keyword2" will return a slightly different result set, because of how Google uses the underscore. On the other hand "keyword1-keyword2" is the same as "keyword1 keyword2" because in Google's eyes, the dash is just used to separate the two keywords.
Such claim is, as was earlier noted, countered by SEOmoz's statistical analysis which found that, while underscores showed a slight positive correlation with rank, hyphens shoeed a slight negative one.