Google: hyphens are nonetheless endorsed over the underscores in search engine optimization URLs

Gary Illyes of Google reiterated that it is still best to use hyphens as punctuation marks in URLs for SEO purposes, while underscores are punctuation marks in your URLs. why Gary explained that “we can’t easily segment when underlining and therefore recommend dashes.”

This appeared in the latest podcast of Search Off The Record at about 17 minutes, where Martin Splitt mentioned “That’s why brevity is important to me too. Yes, of course, you can use a URL shortener, but then you get links like, I don’t know, something.something / 8907d12.And I’m like, yeah, it’s not easy to remember at all.But if it’s like “mobile friendliness test” and I can remember it.But if it’s “mobile_friendly-test” or something And it’s like “uh!” But Gary, you said there was a difference. “

Gary replied, “There’s a difference and that’s in our segmentator. We basically use some parts of the URL to understand what the page is about. And the way it works is that we have to be careful where we segment it because it’s a lot of things on the internet have things that people write about, underline, so we can’t easily segment the underline, so we recommend dashes. “

Here is the embedding:

There’s a lot of history here now about underlines and hyphens in URLs and what Google has already said about them. In 2007, Matt Cutts of Google told us to use hyphens / dashes over underscores and explained that he did not say Google treated the same. In 2017, he said he wanted Google to treat him underlines as punctuation but it did not seem successful at the time. In 2016, John Mueller said underscores and dashes are not important.

So I guess it’s still important, as this is the latest information from Google – that hyphens / dashes are still recommended instead of underscores for URL punctuation.

One big caveat – I wouldn’t change established URLs just to add hyphens – that would be a terrible idea.

Forum discussion on Twitter.