There was an announcement in June by the software giant Microsoft, that it would bring Bing search to its famous gaming console,XBOX, in the current year. This shows that Microsoft is trying to expand its Bing search to many more consumers. The expansion would even work from the SEO point of view. It yet again brings these search engines to one of the basic yet important SEO questions which has been asked not only by the clients, but even by the conference attendees and readers. The golden question is:
Should we use dashes or underscores in our URLs?
The question was discussed some time back even when Google came up with a YouTube video which had its focus on Google’s handling of underscores and dashes. Looking at the video, it was clear that Bing and Google had different strategies for structuring SEO minutiae.
A few years ago, Google had brought the ‘underscores and dashes’ topic to the notice of the SEO world when it originally announced that these underscores and dashes were serving as separators. This announcement from Google had become a hot topic. Later on however, within a week’s time, the search engine giant had backtracked on that statement and said, “wasn’t a done deal yet.”
The recently launched video from Google’s end has Matt Cutts of Google saying that there is still a number of differences in the way dashes and underscores are treated in URLs by Google. This video thus does not give a conclusion to the debate which means that it’s still not a done deal and for the times to come, it might never be done.
The Matt Cutts video details that underscores are treated as a connector for the terms before and after the underscore. He further says that whereas underscore joins the terms, while they are separated when dashes are used. Matt however relieved cautious webmasters when he said that there is no real need to rewrite the URLs which are currently existing to add in underscores instead of dashes. He said that the actual impact on the ranking is minimal and it does not make a major difference. He termed this difference as a second-order effect which would not impact as much as a primary thing (which usually has a huge impact). He even confirmed that Google does not specifically employs staff to work on changing the way Google has been handling dashes and underscores in URLs. He however concluded saying that it can still be considered a best practice.
Talking about Bing’s approach for underscores and dashes in the URLs, a Bing spokesperson gave a confirmation via an email that use of either would not make an impact in the URL ranking features. This response is same as Microsoft’s response which was replied by their spokesperson in 2007. at that time, Bing was well-known as Live Search.
The response from these search engines can still puzzle the webmasters as to what should be done and what not. The answers seems to be simple and repetitive. If one aims to include keywords in their URLs, then dashes can be used. This can be wisely useful for those who are planning to come up with a new website as it can be minutely helpful in improving the rankings. For the existing websites, it would be advisable, not to switch their URLs just for replacing dashes with underscores or vice versa. Reason being that the pages would have been already indexed with Bing, Google and other search engines. Any such change for the existing websites, can have potential gains, but the potential problems would be a step ahead for them.