Dashes in URLs: Good or Bad since Mayday Update?

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

is there any consensus about whether having dashes in the URL to separate keywords is better or worse than not having them (especially since the MayDay update)?

For example, Is there any real difference between:

widgetshop.com/Japanese-Widgets.html

and

widgetshop.com/JapaneseWidgets.html

And another question:

Would you capitalize the J and W in the above examples, or just leave them as lower case j and w ?

Thanks in advance.

[Planet13]

(Side Note: it took about five minutes after I created this thread for google to index it and serve it up in its results - much as I am hating on google right now, that is FAST!).

[tedster]

I don't see any reason why the Mayday update would have changed anything here - the dash is still preferable. Concatenation can be ambiguous, and the underscore character is still indexed as a charaacter.

As far as mixing cases - just say no. Either you'll create canonical problems or you'll need to do some very fancy dancing on the server to make sure that only the exact mix of upper and lower case you intend is the one that resolves 200 OK.

[Planet13]

Thank you, Tedster:

To your point, I just noticed there is a matt cutts video from March of 2009 where he said that the process at google to treat underscores as separaters got side tracked.

And thanks for the clarification about mixing cases.