Should I rename URLs to use hyphens instead of underscores?

[nyc-seo]

Hello.

We are about to launch a redesigned and significantly expanded site that has traditionally used underscores as separators between words in its URLs.

Would you recommend replacing all the underscores with hyphens? That would then require many 301 redirects to maintain any links that might be out there.

Thank you!

[nyc-seo]

Thank you, Nitin.

[nyc-seo]

Thank you very much, Peter!

[Dr-Pete]

I'd tend to agree with Nakul on proceeding with caution - while Google doesn't necessarily treat "_" as a word separator, the URL is just one relatively small ranking factor. There are many risks in a site-wide 301-redirect, especially when you're redesigning. If the redesign runs into SEO trouble, you're not going to be able to separate the many changes, and that could delay fixing any problems.

The exception would be if you're planning to change a lot of the URLs anyway, as part of the redesign. Then, I'd go ahead and do it all at once. Hyphens are a nice-to-have - I'm just not sure that, practically, the risks outweigh the rewards. It does depend a lot on how you're currently ranking and whether the URLs are causing you any major headaches.

[NitinRGoyal]

You should use a hyphen for your SEO URLs. Google treats a hyphen as a word separator, but does ****nottreat an underscore that way. Google treats underscore as a word joiner — so seo_moz is the same as seomoz to Google. In fact using dashes over underscores will have a (minor) ranking benefit.

Also Note that 301 redirects passes 90%-99% value to redirected link so earlier you do it the better.

Hope it makes sense.

[nyc-seo]

Thanks, Nakul!

[NakulGoyal]

If you are just doing a redesign that does not entail any URL changes, I would suggest keep them as is.

On a side note, how are you ranking compared to your competition ?

You could potentially test 1-2 pages on your site, change _ to - and see if it makes any difference. And yes, you would need to do 301 redirects and that would pass most (not all) of your link juice. It can and still work fine. So before you do something like this on a large scale, test it on a small scale if you can.

It also depends on how much authority your site has in Google ? Do your breadcrumbs show up in Google SERPS ? And so on.

I hope this helps you come to the right conclusion.