Which url is more search engine friendly ( using _ (under score) or - (dash)?

Question

i am trying to implement routing on my website. and just want to know which typr of url is more indexed by goolgle?

examples :

1. http://www.example.com/contact_us
2. http://www.example.com/contact-us

also i have one more senario

1. http://www.example.com/products-services
2. http://www.example.com/products-and-services

if i use "and" in url will it make any difference in ranking?

Answer 1

according to most seo article dash is more seo friendly

You might also want to read this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2939578/seo-difference-between-dash-and-hypen

Answer 2

Dashes are much better.

Matt Cutts from Google confirmed that in his blog - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

Regarding "and": check Google Keyword tool. If people search with "and" then use and. If not it's better to skip "and" because URL will be shorter and it's good for SEO.

Answer 3

dash (-) and underscore (_) both can be used in the SEO friendly URLs. A dash is seen as a seperation of keywords and can have a good impact on searching while underscore can be seen as a seperation of words in a phrase by some sniffers. There is much more to it, but this is a short answer.

Answer 4

dash is best as it consider as word separator

here is what Matt Cutts quote time to time

if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″. That’s why I would always choose dashes instead of underscores.

I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.

Matt in February at SMX West, he confirmed that underscores were NOT treated as word separators. According to Matt, this change is still in their queue but unlikely to happen before summer. My interpretation: don’t hold your breath, it’s between summer and never.