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Hyphens

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Yahoo!

SEO > Articles > New York 2004 >

Are hyphens now redundant in domain names? What about page and folder names?

Although Google can now detect separate words within a multiword domain name (including picking up the adult words), it is generally still better to use hyphens to separate the names of pages and folders. Alltheweb is known to ignore anything beyond a second hyphen, and this is a good guideline to follow to make your URL look neater to the end user (even if alltheweb is not a very important search engine).

Directories can be used as a logical way to break up content - for example a section of a travel website about flights to Paris might be located in the directory Europe/France/Paris/index.asp, instead of being called cheap-flights-to-paris.asp in the root directory.