It used to be that google preferred the hyphen (-) to the underscore (_) when it came to page names.
So www.yourdomain.com/page-name-here.html was seen more favourably than www.yourdomain.com/page_name_here.html when it came to listings and positioning.
That’s all changed, and now it makes no difference which one you use – Google treats them both the same.
(We’d recommend sticking to one or the other though, rather than mixing them, for the sake of clarity)
Tinyurl for this post
Fair point. However, from a usability perspective hyphens are a simpler character to type. A few years ago I carried out a brief test of users and found that over half of then typed a hyphen when attempting to type an underscore.
Absolutely – although don’t get me started on domain names with hyphens in them