Mixing hyphens and underscores in a url

[nyc-seo]

Hello.

I am working on a site that was built with underscores in the urls, but only in the page names, not in the subdirectories. All the subdirectories have one-word names.

So a typical url is "example.com/sub1/sub2/page_name."

We would like to change the name of one of the subdirectories to a name that would be very useful for SEO, but this new name is a hyphenated word, let's call it "new-sub."

If we changed "sub2" to "new-sub" then our url would have a mix of underscores and hyphens: example.com/sub1/new-sub/page_name. But if I used "new_sub" instead, google would read the words as connected with an underscore, instead of reading the subdirectory as a hyphenated word, which would be less useful for SEO.

It seems like it might be a problem to have a hyphen in a subdirectory and underscores in the page names. But I want the SEO value of the hyphenated word.

Any recommendations?

Thank you!

[itrogers]

Matt Cutts did a video on this exact issue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQcSFsQyct8

Generally, you should just stick to either underscores or hyphens and not mix the two.

If you want to change all of the underscores to hyphens then make sure you 301 redirect all of the old urls to the new ones. This can be a total pain if your site is huge, but would be necessary if you change the URLs.

[EGOL]

Any recommendations?

If this was my site I would not worry about it.

[nyc-seo]

Thank you, Ian!

[nyc-seo]

Thank you!