Having built an entire site - using hyphens in my page names and image names … I now read that Google doesn’t see underscores as separate words … and recommends instead using hyphens for optimal SEO.
I don’t have any experience with that, but I’ve always used hyphens. Going forward I’d recommend using hyphens, it’s more readable and more widely used imho.
I’d be surprised if google doesn’t understand underscores…
@elementsbot can you tell us if this really matters with naming?
For SEO and readability, Google does prefer hyphens. They see hyphens as word separators, while underscores might be read as part of a continuous string. So, if you want to make those URLs super friendly for both humans and search engines, stick with hyphens.
But don’t worry — you haven’t doomed your site using underscores. While hyphens are generally better for SEO, Google is smart enough to crawl and index underscores too. If you have the time and can make the changes, go for it. If not, it’s not a total disaster.
This is very confusing. When creating MD files in Elements it uses a mix of hyphens and underscores, if hyphens are better why does it not use them instead?