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SEO: Dashes or Underscores?

Posted by jonathan at 1:42pm EST on 10/14/2008

Dashes, dashes, dashes.

This is what the official statement from Google says. (link)

Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.

So when you’re thinking about using dashes or underscores in your permalinks, use dashes.

Let’s take a quick look at the blogging/CMS platforms and how they handle this.

Dashes or Underscores?

Blogger: dashes
WordPress: dashes
Movable Type: underscores
Expression Engine: underscores
Drupal: N/A (uses /node/###)
Joomla: underscores

Based on that quick analysis, Blogger and WordPress are more SEO friendly out of the box. I personally recommend WordPress, both self-hosted and WordPress.com hosted, for a number of reasons, but mostly because it’s so flexible. But if you’re addicted to Google, you might want to try Blogger.

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No Responses to “SEO: Dashes or Underscores?”

  1. Meg

    Oct 14th, 2008

    If I could make the world use WordPress, I would. It’s the easiest to use for newbies, the easiest to modify for experienced users, the fastest to tailor to your search needs in general.

  2. Jonathan Dingman

    Oct 14th, 2008

    Amen to that! I’m a WordPress lover.

  3. Marie

    Oct 17th, 2008

    I personally like blogger as a newbie. The layout is easy to use and I feel the blogger community is strong. Thanks for the tip about the url’s!