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

[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.