Underscore, dot, hyphen or nothing?

What is the best syntax for URLs?

[jetnovo]

Hi there

I know this has probably been discussed already but I couldn't find a reference.

I have a site with a directory structure sometimes 3 levels deep. For example:

www.site.com/directory/another_directory/and_another/

Where my directories have more than one word in them, what is the best way to separate the words?

/another_directory/ (underscore)
/another-directory/ (hyphen)
/another.directory/ (dot)
/anotherdirectory/ (no space)

My initial thoughts are that underscores are bad, because in an underlined URL people might mistake them for spaces. And people might confuse hyphens and underscores if hand-written. And dots aren't always easily readable, therefore maybe having no space and nu punctuation is the way to go?

Can anyone please advise their thoughts/experiences, with regard to useability and search-engine-friendliness.

Many thanks in advance.

[mack]

Hi Jetnovo,

I tend to agree with you about underscores. In the address bar they can easily be mistaken for a space. I tent to use hyphens. To be honest I think search engines are now classing all forms of spacing in the same way , so i dont belive there will be any great advantage to doing it one way ot the other.

One thing I have seen that looks very bad is to simply join words word1word2. It works on from a web browsing point of view, but leads to ugly url's. I go with "-" hyphens

Mack.

[acharles]

Your preference on this will work fine, but we generally use underscore for subdirectory pages. Particularly for a page that's three levels deep, you're not likely going to have a user that memorizes the URL and confuses the underscore for a space. They'll get there by clicking links, either on your site or from SEs.

[darthgus]

I guess its presonal but I like to use only a single word and avoid the whole issue.

I guess that could be really trick with big sites.