Dashes vs. underscores & SEO

[lozza]

So I've always been lead to believe that underscores are better than Dashes for naming file names as such on my site (in sig) all my pages use the underscore:

http://www.atcscases.co.uk/ATC100_SX1/index.html

Now lots of computer programming languages have underscores at the begining. And with googles programming roots it differentiates things with underscore and as such ATC100_SX1 as far as googles concerned is totally different to ATC100-SX1.

This causes the problem if you have a url like ATC100_SX1, Google will only return that page if the user searches for ATC100_SX1 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like ATC100-SX1, that page can be returned for the searches ATC100, SX1, and even “ATC100 SX1″.

This is a big issue for me, within my pages i have the text ATC100-SX1 so i can be found eventually - however i'm now wondering what kind of effect this would have if i renamed the files to dash rather than underscore.

Opinions on this please

 

[paulsheffII]

Personally I much prefer underscores, they make for a much easier to read URL, but seochat uses hyphens and there is a general consensus that Google doesn’t read underscores as spaces so hyphens it is. Unfortunately.