Mar
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What is a more optimized URL structure, Hyphens or Underscores ?
Google treats hyphen as a divider, but this is not the same case when it comes to underscore. This has been a long time discussion within SEO community, and majority of SEO experts believe using hyphens to seperate words in your URL is the best solution.
Here’s a URL example with Hyphens :
http:// www.domain.com/blue-widgets.htm
Here’s a URL example with Underscores :
http:// www.domain.com/blue_widgets.htm
I have conducted several URL structure tests including hyphens, underscores, and slashes in the URL. My conclusion from my experiments and experiences; "The best solution for your URL structure is using hyphens". But remember, over optimized sites will always lose in the long run, so be careful when choosing your URL structure. Never stuff your URL with too many keywords, and never use the same one word keyword more than two times in your URL.
My Page is doing good in SERP’s and it’s with underscores, what should I do?
My recommendation is rename your page with hyphens, and do a permanent redirect from your former URL to your new one. Permanent redirect will carry the page rank value to the new structure, and within very short time your new URL structure will get same or most likely better rankings in SERP’s.
Old URL : http:// www.domain.com/blue_widgets.htm
Rename your page from blue_widgets.htm to blue-widgets.htm and upload your new page. Do a permanent redirect (301 redirect) from blue_widgets.htm to blue-widgets.htm . Never ever do a temporary redirect (302 redirect), you may get your site banned from Google and some other major search engines.
Today’s Quote
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.
Galileo Galilei
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A (hopefully) seamless migration from underscores to hyphens
I’ve become a little too interested in SEO of late, and I learned that hyphens are preferred by Google to underscores. (By the way, many people erroneously label hyphens as dashes; they are two distinct things.) It seems that Google actually indexes a…
[…] June 2nd, 2005
Use Hyphens In URLs
Well, hyphens or underscores, however, Daily SEO claims hyphens are better and, I feel they look much better […]