Hi! Everyone, hope you all are fine.
Today in this post I will tell you why you should use dash (-) not underscore (_) as words separator in URL. If you are going to build a new blog or website and wanting to know whether to use dash (-) or underscore (_) in your URL for making words look separate.
Then I will and even Google will suggest to use dashes (-) because there are languages like C, C++, etc. that have words which contains underscore (_) in it (e.g.: ftp_binary, tmp_max) and generally programmers search for any terms which have underscore (_) so Google takes two words joined with underscore (_)as one word.
E.g.: If you use google panda update as google-panda-update (with dashes) in URL then if any one search for google panda or panda update or google update then it might show up in search result but if you use google_panda_update (with underscore) in URL then there maximum chances that it will not show up in search results for these teams google panda or panda update or google update but if any one search with this term google_panda_update (hardly anyone will do) then it will show up in search result.
There are website who use underscore (_) in there URL and still have higher ranking e.g. Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. that’s because those website have high Page Rank, very high quality contents, proper title, etc. which don’t effect there ranking in search results. Matt Cutts (from Google) also suggest that if your website is working well with underscore (_) then you don’t need to change your URL pattern.
But if you are creating any new website then you are suggested to use dashes (-) in your URL. If you have any question or problem let me know.