A post for those who manually create their own web pages today!
As I was editing a customers website today, I was creating a number of new pages, and noticed that the old pages (inherited from a previous web developer) were all created with underscores (www.nameofsite.co.uk/this_is_the_page_name.php) however the ones I had created I had naturally done with dashes (www.nameofsite.co.uk/this-is-the-page-name.php) which led me to wonder if the type of separator you use will effect SEO in anyway.
After a quick search, I found the blog of Matt Cutts – a Google employee, who seems to be the most informed on this subject. In 2009 he did a talk all about SEO, and one of the points that he mentioned was “Dashes in URL’s are the best” – http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-for-bloggers/- slide 27 gives a brief overview of key-words in URL’s.
Since 2009 there doesn’t seem to be much more that has been said on the subject by Google, so it is probably safe to assume that Matt Cutts information from then still stands. General consensus of other opinions seems to be that hypens are treated the same as spaces, whilst underscores are treated as joined up words.
When you type the same words into Google with hypens, or underscores, you recieve different results, however the results from using hyphens are the same as when you type it with just spaces.
