How Does Google Consider Spaces,- , and _ in urls?

Url Naming: What's better?

[silverbytes]

Keywords in your url are usually good for relevance purpouses.
Does anybody know what of these 3 syntax works better in Google?

IE: Targeted key prhase: blue widgets

Example 1: www.yoursite.com/bluewidgets.html

Example 2: www.yoursite.com/blue-widgets.html

Example 1: www.yoursite.com/blue_widgets.html

Have you experimented with variations and tested?

[sandor]

i personally like the underscore.

i believe underscores, dashes and full stops are treated as spaces.

[ThomasB]

which is better in a url: hyphen or underscore

P.S. Usually, it's a hyphen.

[google.com...]

[oaktown]

Good catch ThomasB.

I seem to recall at least one other post in with GG specifically recommended hyphens rather than underscores.

(begin possible "Senior Moment" here...)

[ThomasB]

oaktown, here we go:

I would go with hyphens, personally.

[webmasterworld.com...]

Yah, I'd stick to hyphens, periods, or commas. Most people seem to prefer hyphens. If you use an underscore '_' character, then Google will combine the two words on either side into one word. So bla.com/kw1_kw2.html wouldn't show up by itself for kw1 or kw2. You'd have to search for kw1_kw2 as a query term to bring up that page.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[freeflight2]

hyphen if it's two words, underscore if it's one word or something you'd like to 'stick' together

[tantalus]

I've seen plenty of instances in the last 6 months where www.yoursite.com/blue_widgets.html has performed well in the serps for "Widgets"

I also notice GG's qualifier "usually"

IMO I don't think Google distinguishes between the three examples above

[ThomasB]

I tend to disagree, especially if the already quoted is still true:

If you use an underscore '_' character, then Google will combine the two words on either side into one word. So bla.com/kw1_kw2.html wouldn't show up by itself for kw1 or kw2. You'd have to search for kw1_kw2 as a query term to bring up that page.

[internetheaven]

underscore if it's one word

Did I miss something again? How can you underscore one word?

[tantalus]

I could be wrong about this ThomasB but I have strong suspicion that the quoted is no longer the case.

internetheaven is the reference to something like "some_thing"

[edited by: rogerd at 1:10 pm (utc) on Nov. 3, 2004]
[edit reason] No specifics, please... [/edit]

[silverbytes]

That's bad news for me... I have my whole site using _ and changing that means changing positioned pages...