underscores vs dashes

If you have an existing website that’s already doing well, don’t make such a widespread change like converting from underscores to dashes. MATT CUTTS: Hi, everybody. A dash is a little horizontal line that floats in the middle of a line of text (not at the bottom: that’s an underscore). Keep the use of underscores strictly to subfolders. Plus, dashes and hyphen in a domain name are more difficult for people to advertise across the radio or by word-of-mouth. For files on the web, spaces are replaced with %20 in URLs (or what you can call a web address) turning: my favorite filename always has spaces in it.jpg, my%20favorite%20filename%20always%20has%20spaces%20in%20it.jpg. Do you want ensure you come up under the proper search terms in Google, Bing, etc.. Always opt for a space. You want to make sure that when you’re choosing your domain name, you’re choosing a name that represents your business in a professional manner. An underscore is different than an underline. I'm Brandon Oelling, the founder of XEQUALS. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz. Yes, Google does have a preference! Before we delve into discussing whether Google likes or dislikes underscores and dashes, let’s take a look at what exactly an underscore and a dash are. Check out his Webmaster Hangout for the full explanation. Hi there! However, the en dash can also be used to provide clarity to a reader when a writer is developing complex compound adjectives. While the avoidance of using spaces in your filenames used to be mostly a computer science issue, it has become a renewed concern as we continually work across platforms and on the web. You can also configure how you prefer files to be named in in Lightroom. Should you choose to convert to dashes for all new images and blog posts moving forward, you should feel confident you can do so without any negative repercussions. Thanks a lot. Easy, don’t go back retroactively, simply institute this approach moving forward. Domain names with hyphens or dashes add extra characters to the name. The hyphen appears on most contemporary English keyboards, but for the sake of completion its unicode value is U+2010. An underscore, also called an underline, low line, or low dash, is a line drawn under a segment of text. Here’s How It’s Affecting Your SEO. In the majority of uses, the en dash is used to write dates and show any ranges in numbers. For you, this means that the easier your URL is to read for humans, the better your website is going to place on search engines. So I learned something new today, about dashes versus underscores and SEO. It is a bit confusing for me. They are visible when an underlined hyperlink is rendered on the screen - underscores get covered by the underline. To keep things simple for humans (and web crawlers) to read, keep the names of your files simple. Question: Q: Finder: Dashes vs Underscores. ... Matt made a post on his blog that read: “some people thought that underscores are the same as dashes … Other search engines may actually downgrade your page ranking when underscores are used. A hyphen is a type of punctuation mark that pairs two words together. Hyphen Dash Underscore I need to name these symbols: - and _ Are "dash" and "hyphen" synonims? Should you use an underscore in URLs? Here’s the most important thing you will ever hear in regards to your site’s URL structure: it should be as simple as possible.Of course, the word simple means something different to everyone. Our mission is to help you navigate your journey with the XEQUALS platform. The potential problems from changing these URLs might be worse than the potential gains from having dashes rather than underscores in them. So let’s get right to it, here’s what you need to know. Today, DNS and NetBIOS (and their apparent successor technologies Active Directory) are updated to support the underscore because so many people did it an… That means that some human users may have a difficult time recalling your domain name, especially because most people are used to domain names that don’t contain dashes. Google treats dashes as word separators and underscores as word joiners. The underscore character, _, originally appeared on the typewriter and was primarily used to underscore words. Underscores are only able to be used in subfolders. esance Senior Member. 28. If you aren’t careful to encode special characters, the content management system that you’re using will encode your file names for you. Another example of programmer syntax translating into the real world is words that start with lowercase letters and follow with a uppercase letters, like eBay. The underscore, by contrast, takes the place of another character, like a number, letter, or symbol; it cannot be used under another character. This_is_a_single_word, but this-is … Underscores vs Dashes On-page SEO . What this means is with Google URLs that use dashes can have an advantage over pages … What about my previously named files or my blog? From the Aspect of SEO Some search engines do not recognize underscores and will drop pages that contain them. – Stacking images in Lightroom, Importing and Backing Up Images in Lightroom – Part 1 of 4, Importing and Backing Up Images in Lightroom – Part 2 of 4, Importing and Backing Up Images in Lightroom – Part 3 of 4. As an interjection dashis. As of 2012, dashes are still the best way to optimize your SEO URLs. http://www.example.com/my-awesome-photo.html. June 23rd, 2009 I am not an SEO guru, but I did read a book on it once… OK, a couple of books. As verbs the difference between underscoreand dash. This YouMoz entry was submitted by one of our community members. As an example, if you use a space while creating a file name, the encoding system will use %20 to replace the space. Google’s Treatment of Underscores vs Hyphens – The Confusion. Thirdly, if you ever plan to show your work on the web (and enable search indexing beyond Google) or other areas such as: Or any other publicly accessible web resource. Dashes are your ticket to file naming nirvana. Since many times you will be using a Command Line Interface (CLI) to navigate your files, you want to make that navigation as easy as possible. Google recommends using hyphens instead of underscores in your URLs. Here are a few tips to ensure that you’re boosting your site’s SEO. Will you ever use the file on the web and/or your own blog? Apple will tell you straight up: “Although OS X and Mac OS formatted disks support spaces in filenames, certain processing scripts and applications may not recognize these characters, or may treat your files differently than expected. Underscores in webpage names. my-favorite-filename-always-has-dashes-in-it.jpg. As nouns the difference between hyphen and underscore is that hyphen is symbol "", typically used to join two or more words to form a compound term, or to indicate that a word has been split at the end of a line while underscore is an underline; a line drawn or printed beneath text; the character. First, some technical concerns. It’s an easy insurance policy. Appendix B of NARA Bulletin 2015-04 states that spaces aren’t allowed in filenames. Plus, dashes and hyphen in a domain name are more difficult for people to advertise across the radio or by word-of-mouth. Dashes are preferred for a couple of reasons. A Closer Look The debate surrounding domain names that contain a dash or an underscore has been around for years. I wanted to give you anupdate on underscores The underscores cause everything in their path to be chosen, whereas hyphens allow each word to be be highlighted individually. Plus, underscores aren’t allowed to be used in domain names. hyphens vs underscores in family naming Just wondering if there’re any recommendations/benefits of using underscores (_) instead of hyphens (-) in family naming convention? We’d like to clarify the things that matter when making a choice – so you can avoid making a bad decision. Underscores are typically found in domain names and in email addresses. Underscore in file names My team and I believe deep in our hearts that inside every one of us is an amazing photographer. Use readable words in your URL structure, not a long string of numbers. underscore. The hyphen(-) has several uses: compound adjectives (e.g., three-ring circus), prefixes (e.g., anti-intellectual), and (less commonly now) to split a word for a line break. Matt Cutts explains the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in a URL. The underscore is not always handled correctly and is not be correctly recognised in DNS or NetBIOS names. It can also be used to signal interruption in a sentence. Here are a few URL strategies to employ: 1. Your computer and web crawlers read hyphens a spacer, which-creates-something-that-looks-like-this. There is no "best". This means that computers read which-creates-something-that-looks-like-this as whichcreatessomethingthatlookslikethis. This means that underscores allow humans to be able to space out the words used, but computers lack the ability to do so. Here's RegexBuddy matching the w operator against multiple ASCII character sets: As you can see, the dash is not matched, but underscore is. It can also be used to join two parts of words together! JavaScript has since added a lot of these functions, and the result can be much more readable than Lodash. Protein Studios, 31 New Inn Yard, Hackney, London EC2A 3EY. Are you looking to learn more about how to improve the SEO of your blog? This is because using hyphens instead of underscores makes it easier for Google’s web crawler to compute the information that your website has and create consistent results. In fact, John Mueller explicitly advises against redirecting URLs just to resolve the underscore vs. hyphen issue. Using letters, numbers, and hyphens to name your files will make sure that the files stored on your website are reported properly. Click here to learn more! Many other sites also recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs. Many translated example sentences containing "dashes and underscores" – Spanish-English dictionary and search engine for Spanish translations. Often referred to as a low dash, an underscore looks like an elongated hyphen. Some platforms ignore the underscore entirely, which would toss all your delicately placed characters into one big mess of alphanumeric stew – resulting in miss opportunities to describe keywords for your files and searchability across the web or your own in-house systems. Underscores in URLs. It’s longer than a hyphen and is commonly used to indicate a range or a pause. This could save you … Be careful not to use too many dashes in your domain name, as that could get your site flagged for other reasons. Consider substituting an underline (_) or dash (-) where you would normally use spaces.”. If you want to use underscores consider the following: All of these items can be affected (unpredictably) by your use of an underscore. Choose a URL that describes the page and gives people a reason t… For a perfect example of this, look at Wikipedia. History of the hyphen vs. underscore SEO URL debate. Underscores are more readable. You should use dashes rather than underscores in your webpage names. One of the reasons this question is so debated is because of a poorly worded comment made by Google’s Matt Cutts in 2007 that to many people seemed to imply that underscores were treated as word separators. Every little thing helps with making your site or images searchable. Dash or Underscore in URL? Because of this, I always recommend using dashes instead of underscores in your filenames and URLs. Underscores can’t be used in domain names, as the underscore character isn’t permitted. At the end of the day, you want to make sure that your website (and all of the pages) on your site are ranking as high as they possibly can. Also, stay away from the following characters: “Although OS X and Mac OS formatted disks support spaces in filenames, certain processing scripts and applications may not recognize these characters, or may treat your files differently than expected. The DNS (Domain Name System) stores your URL in its database. Mad Stacks Yo! With Google, URLs that use underscores in their URL will have the keywords in their URL joined together. The hyphen is part of the standard ASCII character set and has been adopted and managed in software since the earliest days. This means that the URL shows you exactly where to find a specific piece of content on the Internet. The en dash is longer than a hyphen but is the shorter version of an em dash. Avoid overly complex URLs that include multiple parameters. is that underscoreis to underline; to mark a line beneath text while dashis to run quickly or for a short distance. Google’s web crawlers don’t like complex URLs that are filled with unnecessary characters. When you type in a URL into a search bar, there’s a request that’s created to the DNS server to locate the IP address of the URL you’re searching. 6.8 0.0 lodash VS mori A library for using ClojureScript's persistent data structures and supporting API from the comfort of vanilla JavaScript. 3. Seems minor, but it’s these minor things that make a huge difference in the above items. Go with dashes. Underscores can’t be used in domain names, as the underscore character isn’t permitted. Though you’ll never catch me with underscores and dashes in user names. Maybe that’s enough to prevent you from doing so, maybe not. For example, OS X allows certain symbols in filenames that Windows does not. Dashes rule. When it comes to making sure that your website is optimized for search engines, you may have wondered if a dash or an underscore in the URL of your website would have an effect on your site’s SEO. I’m a recovering underscore addict who has moved to dashes. The underscore is read as a connector of the two words making them one word, where as the dash-hyphen is used to separate the words. Avoid the Underscores. As an end result, this means that your site will place better on search engines. Disclaimer: I, personally, used underscores for over 20 years in all my filenames. (euphemistic) damn!. The debate over whether to use dashes or underscores to represent spaces in URLs is rather heated in the web development community, but not quite as extremely so as that of whether to use tabs or spaces when indenting code. Will you want Google (and other search engines) to be able to index your file? Our current standards are based on a hyphen character separation but lately we’re requested to replace all the dashes in family names to underscores. Since Google prefers using hyphens instead of underscores in your URLs, does that mean you should avoid using dashes and underscores altogether? However, keep in mind that hyphen is not an interchangeable punctuation mark that can replace other types of dashes. 8. The term ‘URL’ stands for Uniform Resource Locator. To maintain your audience retention, we recommend avoiding using dashes and hyphen in your domain name. Those keywords provide a signal of what the page is about and help with your rankings. Many computer programming languages use the underscore character in such ways that CLASS is different from _CLASS. I use hyphens for related information, and underscores as I would a space. To produce an underscored … Using a hyphen in your URLs is recommended by Google, because it makes your website easy to read for humans. Support for hyphen in DNS and NetBIOS was included and working in the early standards. This has been an issue for eons that is easily avoided if you just don’t use spaces. Wouter Bos. hyphened variables cannot be selected entirely with a double-click. I use both, as needed. 2. Underscoring/underlining is a proofreading convention that says "set this text in italic type", traditionally used on manuscript or typescript as an instruction to the printer. Failing that the CamelCase wins. Have a question? No, it’s not possible for you to do so. However, hyphens are the way that technology reads spaces, which is why you should start replacing the use of your space bar with a hyphen when building content for your site. The slightly longer answer is, the underscore is traditionally considered a word character by the w regex operator. So let’s look at how spaces screw things up on the web. For example, /toddlers_shoes/ is crawled as /toddlersshoes/, which is not a threat to search engine visibility but not recommended by marketers. Today, we’re going to dive into all of the details and learn if the structure of your URL has an effect on your website’s SEO ranking. Wikipedia uses underscores in all of its URLs, but consistently dominates SERPs for informational searches. September 7, 2011 Dashes vs. That would leave many thinking underscores are the ticket to the promised land, but hold up. As the longest dash, the em dash can be used in replacements of commas, quotation marks, question marks, or parentheses in a sentence. However, the use of an underscore acts as a concatenation signifier. This is useful. Dashes are used to separate groups of words, not to separate parts of words like a hyphen does. Most cameras include a facility to define how files are named, and accented with characters such as dashes. Underscores vs. dashes in URLs Matt Cutts explains the difference between how Google interprets underscores and dashes in a URL. I've just discovered, when searching for a file named with dashes such as "file-test-test.anything", Finder cannot see it if I search without dashes; "file test test.anything". Using a Dash or an Underscore in Urls: What You Need to Know. If you’re just starting on a new website, use dashes if you plan to place keywords in your URLs. http://www.example.com/myawesomephoto.html. You use what works for you. John Mueller of Google said in a Google Hangout on Google+ at the 21:41 mark "we [Google] don't really care about underscore versus dashes." Hyphens can be used in subdomains, subfolders, and domain names (although we don’t recommend using hyphens in domain names, as listed above). To maintain your audience retention, we recommend avoiding using dashes and hyphen in your domain name. Hyphens are short little lines used to connect two or … Underscore vs. underline. Permalink to comment # December 16, 2009. camelCase works fastest and is my preferred style. If you are trying to underline any letter, number, or other text, the underline feature should be used. So a file for a class (CS 3358), coming from a "Assignment" folder, named "file.cpp" I would name "CS-3358_Assignment_file.cpp", and that system is just for that type of file or folder.

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