What is better? - or _

for inside html pages in a site.

[caspita]

Looking for a domain for my new web project I become to know that '_' character is not allowed in a domain name, only '-' can be used. ie, it is possible to register www.my-example.com domain but www.my_example.com domain.

Looking into that I was thinking if the same rule could apply when you name your html pages and it can be important for the Search Engines. ie:

What do you think is better, 1 or 2 from below and why? :

1. www.my-example.com/my-first-page.html
2. www.my-example.com/my_first_page.html

I used to use #2 because looks more natural for me, that's it. But since I knew about the domain name rules I have been thinking that use #1 could be better, what do you think?

Of course this would apply to a new fresh site or new pages only, a site already running should not change the page names if those are already indexed.

Carlos.

[Mourf]

GoogleGuy confirmed a few days ago that an underscore is treated like no space. Im not 100% sure this applies to URLs as well as content. An example of this would be that this_is_a_page would be thisisapage to Google.

Do a search in the forums for GoogleGuy's post.

[caspita]

I found this very on topic .. topic :-)

[webmasterworld.com...]

is not only advised there to use hypens '-' to separate the words in the URI, also is advised to use only lowercase for the URI, short URIs and the most important, a disscussion and reference to an article about to eliminate the extension files like .html, .asp, .php, .jpg and so on .. so.. the killer page would be like

[mysite.com...]

very good post there.

Carlos.

[Yidaki]

>this would be that this_is_a_page would be thisisapage to Google

Nope, let me be pedantic: this_is_a_page would be this_is_a_page since the underscore is treated like a character and neither like a space nor like nothing.

[BigFish]

So what is the conclusion?

That this-is-a-word will be this is a word to Google right?

The - would be better since it will recognize the keyword "word"?

[peter andreas]

Hi, Interesting thread
How do you remove the extension from the url eg .html?
thanks

[caspita]

For the two post above...

My conclusion is that this-is-word will be better parsed that this_is_a_word.. it seems to apply also for domain names, every body says that thisdomain.com is better that this-domain.com, and it is, but if your are lookign for better SERPs based ok kewords in your domain the second option will be better.

Now, to remove the extension from the URI you can use a simple mode rewrite in your htaccess file or the conf file for apache.

do a search on this forum, you will fine many topics .. some of them will be me asking for help :-) then jpmorgan, the expert here, will be the best adviser.

regards...
Carlos.