What's better for SEO? StackOverflow.com style "domain.com/91512/some-trimmed-text" or "domain.com/91512_some-trimmed-text"

Question

Love to hear your opinions and justification?

I've heard deep directories are bad, but how does it compare to underscore characters?

Answer 1

Use dashes - Google regards dashes as separating words, but underscores are considered part of the word. See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000574.html.

Answer 2

These trick are good for 1 week than it changes. All SEO stuff aren't based on written rule. It's very suggestive and between SEO they do not really agree, so to have the number written as directory or before an underscore doesn't really have a better way. Of course, it's better to have the title the way SO work for indexing but for how to organize folder/files, it doesn't matter (of course some SEO will tell the different and this same guy will change his believe in 1 month...).

Answer 3

As of August last year Matt Cutts was still saying that dashes were kind of better than underscores but hinted that they would eventually be treated the same.

Most SEOs consider Matt the leading expert in the field and the main, albeit unofficial, Google spokesperson to the SEO community.

But the question was really about underscore vs. forward slash. I would posit there is not much difference but would offer a third alternative which is quite common: domain.com/91512-some-trimmed-text. We use this a lot in Rails apps because Active Record can use the table id as if the following string did not exist.