---
title: "Hyphens in URLs: Google rewords its guidelines"
description: "Google reworded the hyphens section of its URL structure documentation. I look at what exactly changed and whether you need to change URLs on your site."
date: 2026-10-22
category: SEO
tags: ["URL", "Google", "Google guidelines", "Technical SEO"]
url: https://uper.pl/en/blog/hyphens-in-urls-google-guidelines/
---

# Hyphens in URLs according to Google What changed in the documentation and whether you need to fix anything

Google rewrote the "Use hyphens to separate words" section of its URL structure documentation. The recommendation itself has not changed: **use hyphens instead of underscores in URLs**. Only the reasoning is new and more precise, so most sites have nothing to fix.

I have always used hyphens (`-`) rather than underscores (`_`) in my projects. Many people in SEO have recommended this for years, including at times when Google's own pages said nothing about it, and Google itself explained the topic on video back in 2009.

## What exactly Google changed

Barry Schwartz covered the change on Search Engine Roundtable, comparing the current version of the document with an Internet Archive copy from October 15, 2026. The edit is editorial and touches one sentence: the one with the reasoning.

**The first sentence of the section is unchanged**: Google recommends using hyphens (`-`) instead of underscores (`_`) to separate words in URLs, because it helps users and search engines identify concepts in the URL.

**The explanation of why not underscores has changed.** Both versions start by saying Google doesn't recommend underscores "for historical reasons", and both give the same programming example: function names like `format_date`, where the underscore joins words into a single concept. There are two differences:

- the old version said in general terms that "this style" is already commonly used to denote concepts that should stay together; the new one says explicitly that it means underscores,
- the new version adds the other half of the comparison: hyphens **clearly signal a word boundary**.

Schwartz suspects someone at Google touched up this passage after new videos about URLs in search were published. Google hasn't confirmed this; it is only his guess.

## Why the underscore is a problem

In programming, `format_date` is a single identifier. That is why the underscore reads as "this is one thing", while the hyphen reads as "the word ends here". The URL `/local-seo/` reads unambiguously as two words, while `/local_seo/` can look like a single name.

Note the phrase "for historical reasons", too. Google doesn't say underscores are a technical error today, only that the hyphen is the established convention, under which neither people nor search engines have to guess where a word ends.

The table of examples in the documentation also has a third variant that is easy to forget: **joining words with no separator at all** (e.g. `greendress`) is marked as not recommended as well.

## Google talked about this as early as 2009 and 2011

The Google Search Central channel published its first video on the topic on March 6, 2009. In "Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?" Matt Cutts gives a viewer a short answer: hyphens are the better choice, but if a site with underscores is doing well, there is no point rebuilding its structure. He adds that Google had considered treating underscores as separators, but the team eventually moved on to another, more effective improvement in how URLs are evaluated. At the time a hyphen separated words and an underscore did not, although Cutts noted this could change.

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Two years later, on August 5, 2011, the same channel published a longer video, "Underscores vs. dashes in URLs", in which Cutts returns to the topic and explains where the distinction came from:

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The key points from the 2011 video:

- Google treated the hyphen as a separator: from `red-widget` it indexed "red" and "widget" as separate words. It joined underscores, so `war_of_1812` was a single term.
- The reason was historical. Google's early engineers were programmers and wanted to search for exact names from code, such as the C constant `TMP_MAX`, not pages where "TMP" and "MAX" appear separately.
- Cutts called it a second-order effect. Wikipedia has plenty of URLs with underscores and that doesn't hurt its rankings, because other signals matter more.
- Google considered splitting words on underscores too, but the impact on results was small enough that the engineers were given more important projects.
- The advice was the same as today: for a new site choose hyphens, and don't rewrite a working site with underscores URL by URL.

These videos explain the "for historical reasons" wording in the current documentation well. They are over a decade old, though, and today's documentation no longer describes how Google indexes underscores, so I wouldn't treat the 2009 and 2011 details as a current description of how the search engine works.

## Do you need to change your URLs now

No. Google changed how the recommendation is described, not the recommendation itself. The documentation doesn't mention any penalty or say that underscores lower rankings, and the update adds no new requirement.

In practice I separate two situations:

- **New URLs** (a new site, a new section, a new store): when designing from scratch, hyphens should be the standard, along with lowercase letters. It costs nothing.
- **Existing URLs with underscores**: if a site has run on one structure for a long time, changing it is usually not worth it. Changing a URL means 301 redirects, updates to internal links, sitemaps and canonical tags, and a risk of temporary visibility swings, and the wish to "tidy up" URLs rarely justifies that.

During a migration, a platform change or a restructuring of your content, you can fix the underscores along the way, because the extra cost is small at that point.

## What else the documentation says about URL structure

The same page has a few other recommendations that often come up in technical audits:

- **Non-ASCII characters** should be percent-encoded in links (the documentation gives the example of "gemüse" written as `gem%C3%BCse`). This also applies to accented characters if they appear in your URLs.
- **Parameters**: where possible, shorten URLs by removing parameters that don't change the page content.
- **Case**: URLs are case-sensitive. If your server treats uppercase and lowercase the same way, standardise on one variant.
- **Session IDs**: avoid them in URLs and consider replacing them with cookies.

The quickest way to check how Google handles the URLs on your site is the indexing reports in [Google Search Console](/en/blog/google-search-console/). On large sites, also check that the URLs in your [XML sitemap](/en/blog/sitemap-xml-analysis-indexing-guide/) are written consistently.

## Summary

Google added to its documentation that hyphens clearly mark a word boundary, while underscores, familiar from function names, join words into a single concept. It is the same advice Matt Cutts gave back in 2009 and 2011, and the one I have always followed in my projects: for a new site, hyphens are the standard. Change existing URLs with underscores only during a migration or a rebuild, because cosmetics alone rarely cover the cost of redirects.

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      question: 'Did Google change its rules on hyphens in URLs?',
      answer: 'No. The recommendation is the same: hyphens instead of underscores. Only the reasoning changed: it now names underscores explicitly and adds that hyphens clearly signal a word boundary.'
    },
    {
      question: 'Do URLs with underscores lower rankings in Google?',
      answer: 'Google’s documentation says nothing about a penalty or lower rankings. The recommendation is about making it easier for users and search engines to recognise words and concepts in the URL.'
    },
    {
      question: 'Since when has Google recommended hyphens over underscores?',
      answer: 'Since at least 2009. Matt Cutts advised choosing hyphens in a Google Search Central video from March 6, 2009, and in a video from August 5, 2011 he explained that Google treats a hyphen as a word separator and joins words connected by an underscore.'
    },
    {
      question: 'Should I change existing URLs that use underscores?',
      answer: 'Usually not, if they work and are indexed. A change requires 301 redirects and updated internal links, and the risk of temporary visibility swings is often greater than the gain. Consider it during a migration or a bigger rebuild of the site.'
    },
    {
      question: 'What does a good URL look like?',
      answer: 'Short, lowercase, without unnecessary parameters or session IDs, with words separated by hyphens, for example <strong>/local-seo/</strong>.'
    }
  ]}
  heading="Frequently Asked Questions"
  id="faq"
/>

## Sources

1. **Google Search Central: URL structure best practices**
[https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/url-structure#use-hyphens-to-separate-words](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/url-structure#use-hyphens-to-separate-words)

2. **Search Engine Roundtable: Google Updates URL Structure Best Practices For Hyphens In URLs**
[https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hyphens-in-urls-doc-42346.html](https://www.seroundtable.com/google-hyphens-in-urls-doc-42346.html)

3. **Previous version of the document (Internet Archive, October 15, 2026)**
[https://web.archive.org/web/20261015063050/https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/url-structure#use-hyphens-to-separate-words](https://web.archive.org/web/20261015063050/https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/url-structure#use-hyphens-to-separate-words)

4. **Google Search Central: Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs? (YouTube, March 6, 2009)**
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k)

5. **Google Search Central: Underscores vs. dashes in URLs (YouTube, August 5, 2011)**
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQcSFsQyct8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQcSFsQyct8)