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.