SEO Friendly URLS –Hypens(-) and Underscore(_) Usage of in URLS

URL Structure - Which one is best Hypen or Underscore in URL

URL structure should be as simple as, it should in human readable that means it should have words rather than numbers, session ids and parameters. It will be difficult for the crawlers at the time indexing the URLs

Ex: www.abc.com/shoes=sneakers?session =1234455&sid =aa2344555.

The best practices of URL writing is usage of punctuation in URLS like  Hypen or Underscore

Ex: www.abc.com/men-shoe, www.abc.com/shoes_for_men

Hype is used to separate the words while underscore is used for joining the words.

Now which one to use, it is always better to use hypen, since the url will be indexed for  two words “men” & “shoe” where you have more chance to get traffic.

Best practices of URL Structure

1.    Keep short of URLs whenever it is possible
2.    Use robot.txt to block crawling the problematic urls
       Problematic urls – Dynamic URLS,
       URLS that generate search results
       URLS that generate infinite space like calenders
3.    Avoid Using session id in URLS when ever possible
4.    If you have calendar use nofollow link attribute to links to dynamically created future calendar pages.

Whether you use Hypen or Underscore in the url it doesn’t make much different. But it use hypes in the urls for the fresh websites and do not rewrite the underscore with hypen in URL.

It is up to you to decide which one “Hypen or underscore” will work fine for you.