I think that I almost have my URL rewriting functionality ready to go on my CMS system. It seems to be working pretty well, and I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out.

I have a question though. I have built into the CMS functionality the ability to specify a "Friendly URL" for each menu item. The Friendly URL is a lookup against the database for the page name.

The system works by identifying the MenuID andPageID then rendering it accordingly from the database. So a URL that would normally look like:
index.php?page_id=1?menu=12
Gets rewritten as:
1-12.html

With the "Friendly URL" I can specify a text name for each page instead of an integer value (Making it possible to stuff keywords). So instead of having:
1-12.html
I have something like:
CreatingWebsites-12.html

My question is: is it better to place no spaces between words for the "Friendly URL" or should I seperate them with an Underscore like:
Creating_Websites-12.html

Or is there a different method that I should be using to accomplish this?

Thanks

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My preference would be a hyphen if I were to do similar. I don't think the url has very much influence, if any, on serps though.

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Actually, I can't use a hyphen because that is one of the seperators for the URL query parts. I decided to use a hyphen instead of an underscore for the sperator because in regular expressions, a hyphen is not consided a "Word" item, and an underscore is. This makes it much easier to do the rewrites as well as validating corrent values for the Friendly URL value from the user.

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A few people tested the hyphens vs underscores awhile back and it was pretty clear that google did not dillineate between individual words with the underscore. ex. allinurl: real estate

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I see your point. I may have to come back and rewrite my rules. Thanks Google for making my life more difficult.

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My personal opinion is not to sweat the url's as they don't seem to be much of a factor in the serps as long as the variables are taken out. I've not tested it though.

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Creating_Websites-12.html is better, the words are then recognized as sinlge keywords instead of one keyword.

yes,But rewrite hyphens is better

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iv always used the hyphen it seems to work much better in both cases.

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