Placing dashes or underscores in URLs to separate keywords (see Keywords in URLs) is believed to be helpful for exact word parsing by search engines. And yes it is true! However, as of now (1/22/08) Google officially confirmed that “dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not.” It was also noted that as the technology constantly improves we will see some changes in the way underscores are handled. But to be on a safe side and use the optimal naming techniques for your pages we recommend using dashes to separate your keywords, rather than underscores.

Examples:

blog_seo_tips.html – not recommended
blog-seo-tips.html – way to go!

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