Dashes Verses Underscores In Web Addresses

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Sunday, 28th August 2011

Google have confirmed that they treat dashes (-) and underscores (_) differently when they index your website in preparation of people searching for your awesome content. The difference is subtle, but important. Let's explore it with a simple example. The example is:

Your-Article-Name - or with underscores, Your_Article_Name

The first example, Your-Article-Name, is treated by Google as meaning "Your Article Name". This is probably what you expected to happen. In the second example, though, Your_Article_Name gets treated as "YourArticleName". Quite different!

So the dash acts as a separator, whereas the underscore is a joiner.

What does this mean for your website? Probably not too much! Google is actually quite clever at indexing content, so the difference this makes to your website is marginal - but if you are writing a new website you should opt for dashes rather than underscores, not just because Google advise it - but also because it is more readable for your visitors, which is the most important quality of a web address.

You can watch the YouTube film from Google Webmaster Help for more details.

Why TypeScript Interfaces Can Extend Classes

When I originally discovered that TypeScript interfaces can extend classes, I thought it was novel but lacking in real-world usages. At the time, I had a solution with no problem so for the sake of argument I tried to imagine what the problem might be. Perhaps you could point an interface at a third party class to ensure that your swappable implementation stayed in step with any changes to the original. Not a compelling reason to use this feature by any means.

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