Curious as to your opinion on this too. Since PRO will be moving to a new SEO friendly system soon... which is best?

domain.com/my_page_title

OR

domain.com/my-page-title

? What's your thoughts?

Matt Cutts wrote:

With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing. Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So 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″.

found here.... http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

and this ..

Quote:

Much of the current "Professional" SEO advice on this matter is based on a blog entry written by Matt Cutts, Google Software Engineer since early 2000. Matt makes an effort to explain why dashes are preferred, in his perspective, because when he first needed to use a search engine to find programmatic keywords and variables used in programming languages back in 1999, Google returned better results. Underscores were (and still are) frequently used in those keywords and variables used in programming languages.

and this found here... http://12pointdesign.com/advice/dashes_vs_underscores.asp

would tell me htat you are more likly to get better resaults using dashes.. I have always used a dash, as thats what i was tought to use, dont remember why. Internet - dashes, Videos _ underscore

I personally think dashes look better, and from what an Andrew just posted looks like they are better for Google searches too

That seems to be what I'm reading too. Thanks guys.

Makes me wonder why the heck Expression Engine was using underscores by default. Now I have a ton of links to correct.

You know, then again, I guess it depends on the way you want the item found.

For example.

If I want visitors searching for "Haleakala National Park" I might want to do this: haleakala-national_park

That way I get them if they use just "haleakala" and if they include the "national park" on the end.

Maybe it doesn't matter at all anymore. Look at the top results for either... it's mixed:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS239US239&q=dashes+versus+underscores&btnG=Search

Some uses the hyphen with good results and others the underscore.

UPDATE
Well dang... underscores do seem to work better. I've been testing it on "Akaka Falls"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS239US239&q=akaka+falls&btnG=Search

It recognizes them in the akaka_falls format, but not if you search for "akaka_falls" or "akaka-falls"

I guess Google got smarter since 2006.

Ultimately the point is that most users will not use quotes, the hyphen, or a underscore when they search. And if what i'm testing is right... the underscore in a url returns the most accurate results.