Are Dashes or Underscores Best?

Dashing Through the Snow,
errr, Domain Name! Or… Are
Dashes or Underscores Best?

Let’s take another dip into the "every little bit helps" pool.

Seems some like to debate the merits of using dashes or underscores in domain names. Ad nauseum.

First let’s agree you can get a bit of extra credit with Google if you do this right. But it’s only marginal.

Still which IS right? Dashes or underscores?

Engage your brain cause this is gonna get at least a little techie. Sorry, can’t be avoided.

Plus to prove it, we’re going to do some Google searches. So you can see for yourself how Google treats search terms with dashes, without dashes, and with underscores.

To set a benchmark I cast the broadest net possible by doing a simple search using…

affordable search engine placement

Google returned these results:

Searched the web for affordable search engine placement.
Results 1 - 10 of about 78,600

There were 78,600 pages that use ANY of those keywords.

Okay next I searched on the same phrase only this time separated the words by dashes:

affordable-search-engine-placement

Google returned these results:

Searched the web for affordable-search-engine-placement.
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,160.

That gave considerably fewer results.

Then I searched on the same words separated by underscores:

affordable_search_engine_placement

Google returned these results:

Searched the web for affordable_search_engine_placement.
Results 1 - 4 of about 6.

Whoa! Way fewer pages, right?

Finally searched for

"affordable search engine placement"

Note the quotes. Which limits the search results to that specific phrase just like you were doing an advanced search for that exact phrase.

Google returned these results:

Searched the web for "affordable search engine placement".
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,160.

Huh, exactly the same as with the keyword phrase with dashes.

Okay so what do we got?

The first search returns what you could say is a free for all with listings showing any of the words in the keyword phrase entered. That’s why there are so many search results.

SIDEBAR: Know what? Sadly this is how most people search. Which gets them close to what they want but not quite! Yet the dramatically bigger number of SERPS explains why it is much harder to rank well in that case. Because you are going up against a whole bunch more pages. Some totally unrelated to the info being sought. So it’s takes more juice, ie on page optimization, internal links and maybe even in bound links to come out on top in that case.

While with the underscore, which Google treats as any other CHARACTER, the results were next to none.

Yet the keyword phrase with dashes and exact phrase search turned up the same number of listings. At this point you should be wondering why that is.

Glad you asked. Now this is important so engage…brain…here.

The reason for this is Google uses the dash to separate the words in the phrase. Programmers would call this a "delimiter". In essence Google sees it as a space or separator between the words. Or in other words Google treats the dash as a spacer.

Now if Google treated the dash and underscore alike the SERPs returned for searching for either

affordable_search_engine_placement

or

affordable-search-engine-placement

would be identical. Agreed? But as you can see they are not. Instead there’s a big difference between the two.

So to answer the original question which is best dashes or underscores, it’s obvious isn’t it? You want to use dashes in your domain names, folder names, files names etc. That’s not theory or speculation. Just fact.

A domain, folder, or file name with dashes separating the words will give you the biggest Google impact - however much that is. While using underscores won’t help one iota. That’s it. End of debate.

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