SEO Tycoon

**Dan Schulz** · 05-19-2008, 06:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bakerc

SEO stuff aside,

From a user’s point of view following a link, wouldn't an underscore be easier to read. I'm not on about people copying links or passing a link address on - I mean for Joe Bloggs viewing your site, wouldn't an underscore make the word more reader friendly, make it look more like proper English (or whatever language)

IMHO…

Link_to_this

Looks better visually (is cleaner) than

link-to-this

You might want to read the second half of this post then - you'll be quite surprised... http://www.webmaster-talk.com/seo-ta...tml#post724750

Quote:

Originally Posted by nyef

That may be true for google, but google isn't the whole world. I'm sure there are plenty of other search engines and search-enabled directories that still don't treat underscores as spaces.

The other major ones do. Which happen to have a literal stranglehold on the major search engine market. Now if you're talking about niche search engines, then that's a whole 'nother story.

**bakerc** · 12:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dan Schulz

You might want to read the second half of this post then - you'll be quite surprised... http://www.webmaster-talk.com/seo-ta...tml#post724750

I read that, I was not talking about how the site gets crawled or indexed, I was on about how the user sees the site.

To the end user the link will still read

link_to_this

instead of

link-to-this

and bearing in mind everybody reckons you should design your site for people and not SE then wouldn't the link_to_this be more readable then link-to-this(as previously mentioned) by an actual person

**vangogh** · 05-21-2008, 06:44 PM

Carl it might look nicer, but only because you don't see the underscores. Now imagine I was on your site "your_great_website.com" I visited, I enjoyed, and I want to come back, but I forgot to bookmark the site.

I go to my address bar and type what I saw "your great website.com" Of maybe I want to send a link to a friend and I type what I see so again it's "your great website.com"

The issue from a human readability perspective is if you don't see the underscores and don't realize they're there you can't type it correctly later.

The dashes make it clear there aren't spaces between the words allowing the link to be typed directly later.

**bakerc** · 05-22-2008, 12:44 PM

Now that makes more sense, thanks.

**vangogh** · 05-22-2008, 06:28 PM

Glad to clarify.

**Brandon** · 05-22-2008, 07:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

neither really, but hyphens are treated as spaces and will separate the words. Whereas underscores will join the words into a single block.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

2005

this is a few years newer, saying there is little to no difference.

Quote:

If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says some people thought that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whiteh...-for-bloggers/

**smoseley** · 08:01 PM

Forgetting SEO for a second, underscores are superior, because they are treated the same way by all operating systems, whereas hyphens are not.

**chrishirst** · 05-22-2008, 08:14 PM

Just do the searches for goodness sake!

red_cadillac
red cadillac
red-cadillac

pink_cadillac
pink cadillac
pink-cadillac

giant purple people eater
giant_purple_people_eater
giant-purple-people-eater

It's not like it's difficult to see they are NOT the same!!

**smoseley** · 01:37 PM

Chris,

That's an illogical conclusion. The only thing you can say for sure from your data is that the inclusion of a hyphen or underscore in the query will yield different results than with a space, i.e. the user would have to query specifically for "red_cadillac" to see the altered search results.

That is not a real-world scenario, and it implies nothing about how hyphens and underscores are parsed IN THE URL.

**vangogh** · 05-23-2008, 08:10 PM

All that Chris said was if you search you can see that dashes and underscores aren't the same. I don't believe there was anything in his post to imply one was better than the other, just different.

I'm not sure why operating systems would come into play in this discussion. From either an SEO standpoint or a human readability standpoint it's irrelevant how your operating system treats things.

**Learning Newbie** · 05-23-2008, 08:41 PM

Operating systems might come into play in that Windows and Front Page both allow spaces in file names, which potentially lets you push up some nasty%20filenames.html to the server. I don't know what that has to do with anything? Web servers follow the rules of what chars are allowed in a URL and what aren't.

**smoseley** · 05-24-2008, 12:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vangogh

All that Chris said was if you search you can see that dashes and underscores aren't the same. I don't believe there was anything in his post to imply one was better than the other, just different.

But what *I* was saying is that different in the query doesn't imply different in the results, because the query not necessarily (and in fact, likely not) parsed the same way as the URL.