Dashes or Underscores? Setting up your Joomla SEO

Written by Steve Burge

In the last couple of weeks, we've heard the great news that the default version of Joomla 1.5 will produce more Search Engine Friendly URLs than the current package.

The forum post has turned from happiness to suggestions about what the new URLs should look like.

One of the key questions was whether underscores should remain in the URL or if dashes would be better.

Should URLs be www.joomla.com/1.5-is-now-out or should it be www.joomla.com/1.5_is_now_out ?

The answer is simple:

Dashes are better for searching. Matt Cutts, the Google engineer, gives a technical explanation of this on his blog.
Dashes are better for readability. As Ken, the developer of Open-SEF points out, underscores are much harder to read, especially if they are in a link that is underlined.
Dashes are actually used in English. See if you can name 10 English words with a - in them. Now see if you can name 10 English words with an _.

If you have a well-established site using underscores, is it worth moving over? Probably not, because of all the time it would take to reindex your site, but for all new sites, dashes are definitely the best bet.

Proof of this idea can be found with three simple searches:

search engine friendly 26,300,000 Google results
search-engine-friendly 1,530,000 Google results
search_engine_friendly 476 Google results

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Your Comments (4)

Amy Stephen

March 07, 2007

"The forum post has turned from happiness to suggestions about what kind the new URLs should look like."

lol! So true!!! Poor Johan. The guy can't buy a break. Even after demonstrating super hero powers of rebuilding the entire SEF URLs environment - now, he gets to hear all of our great ideas for more! You've got to admire him for putting up with us!

Herbert-Jan van Dinther

March 07, 2007

Right on, always use dashes or hyphens or whatever you want to call them...!

Here is another great Blog from Matt on the subject:
http://mattcutts.com/blog/gues...w-session/

And for other components then OpenSef, which does that already, here is a short explanation on how to do that with others.
http://seo4joomla.wordpress.co...oomla-seo/

So lets hope there is a choice in the new Joomla, but I just love Dashes / Hypens smilies/grin.gif

Steve Burge

March 07, 2007

Hey Amy - sounds like one of those parodies of community development - one person digging and ten people helping him work out where to dig. Johan really is doing an outstanding job.

Hey Hummerbie - I'm going to have to start reading back through your blog before I make a post - thats the second time recently that you've beaten me to it

Thanks for the Vanessa Foz link too. One very interesting and possibly Joomla related quote:

don?t use ?&id=? in the URL for anything other than a session ID. Since it generally is a session ID, we treat it as such and usually don?t include those URLs in the index.

There are 1000s of Joomla sites out there with just those characters in their static URLs.

Tim Acheson

August 10, 2009

Having devoted considerable time to this question during my career, particularly in recent years, I can only conclude that dashes are not the best delimiter. Moreover, I believe a consensus will emerge eventually with an alternative character being used universally -- probably the underscore:-

http://www.timacheson.com/Blog/2009/aug/friendly_url_should_not_use_dashes_to_represent_spaces