I answer the question of whether to use hyphens in URLs one way for the domain name portion of URLs and a different way for the folder and file name portions of URLs.Hyphens in the Domain Name:Generally speaking I avoid using hyphens in domain names. I do so NOT because of SEO. Instead, I choose to NOT use hyphens in domain names because I think it s best for the users of the site. Not many people will remember the entire URL to some random page on your site, but hopefully most will remember your domain name. For this reason, you want your domain name to be easy to remember, easy to type, and as short as possible. Adding hyphens to domain names is counter to all 3 of those goals.Since the beginning of the Internet, domain names have generally been void of hyphens. It s only been in the last 5 years or so when domain names without hyphens became scarce that people began settling for domains with hyphens (similar to settling for .net, .org, .info, etc. TLDs because the .com equivalent is already taken). So people have been used to domains without hyphens in them... they almost expect them to not have hyphens because that is the case most of the time... especially for any kind of real commercial sites. Hyphens also mean the act of typing out the domain is harder becaues the user has to hit keys on the row of numbers above the QUERTY row... it s an extra stretch. And using hyphens makes the domain name longer.The search engines have been matching keywords in domain names without hyphens just fine for a long time, so the miniscule, microscopic added SEO benefit of using hyphens is FAR outweighed by the usability benefit of NOT using them IMO.This should help you decide: Off the top of your head, list any popular, brand site that has hyphens in their URL. You ll be hard pressed to come up with one. Now think of popular, brand sites without hyphens. I d be willing to be you have NO problem doing this.Hyphens in folders and file names: With the folder and file name portions of the URL I STRONGLY urge you to use hyphens to explicitly separate words in the URL. Users are not likely to remember anything beyond the domain name anyway, so there is no real usability benefit in NOT having hyphens as explicit word separators. So in this case I would decide in favor of the miniscule SEO benefits you can gain by being explicit about how the words in your folder and page names are split up instead of hoping the engines will get them right. Hyphens vs. underscores as word separators:NEVER use underscores as word separators. Google does NOT recognize the _ as a word separator. It treats it differently than - .
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