Question about urls

Is one more beneficial than the other?

[saltwaterpizza]

Hi everyone. I've read on here that Google likes it better if your graphics, links, etc, have hyphens in them rather than underscores or being all linked together. For example:

Good:
blue-widgets.gif

Not As Good:
bluewidgets.gif
blue_widgets.gif

Does this concept also apply to urls? I ask because I've had a url going for a year in the format bluewidgets, but am now considering also getting the url blue-widgets so that Google might be able to use each of the words in the url.

Does this make a difference? If I point both urls to bluewidgets, will Google like this, or get upset?

Thanks for your help in advance!

Scott

[dwilson]

bluewidgets and blue_widgets won't HURT you. It's just that they won't help you rank for blue widgets. blue-widgets will.

hth
dwilson

[saltwaterpizza]

Thanks dwilson. Has this varied over time? I'm curious if there was ever a time when Google preferred underscores to hyphens.

[zeus]

I got a good exaple my domain is free-whatever-something and another site in my categorie got freewhateversomething and we are 1 and 2 on the most keywords so no effect as long as it can not make another word between the words in the domain name, if you know what I mean.

zeus

[Splosh]

zeus - do you mean, for example, "hotellerwick" also has the word "teller" that spans across the two words so therefore "hotel-lerwick" would be the better option to break the url up into their correct words?

I know thats a wierd example but it was all that i could come up with. :)

[pixel_juice]

>>I got a good exaple my domain is free-whatever-something and another site in my categorie got freewhateversomething and we are 1 and 2 on the most keywords so no effect

This would only be true if there were no other factors affecting the rankings.

Google indexes underscores [google.com] just like any other character, so a search for word1_widget2 appears to google to be for one long word. Likewise word1widget2 appears to be 1 word. Google does not partial match terms in longer words.

However, Google doesn't index hyphens [google.com] and so if you want to separate keywords, a hyphen is preferable, as it gets treated just like a space.

[zeus]

Splosh, yep thats what I mean.

zeus