Underscores or Hyphens in the URLs?

Search engines give a little weight to keywords found in domain names and URLs. Because URLs and domains do not allow spaces, one must use either underscores or hyphens as word separators (or not use any separators at all).

Google does not treat underscores as word separators. That's why Google won't consider keyword1_keyword2 as matches to keyword1 and keyword2. Obviously, it is better to use hyphens in your URLs and domains.

If you have already used underscores, don't change your page names to hyphens. The weight given to matches in URLs and domains is not significant enough to be worth the time of waiting that search engines need to recrawl and reindex the changed URLs. You should consider using hyphens for the sites and pages that you are going to make in the future.

There's another benefit of using hyphens in the domain names. Many directories link to sites using their domain names as the anchor text. In this case, hyphens will help a lot, because Google will treat them as anchor text matches.

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