Building URL's is there a difference between = and - ?

[Chaits]

I have a Product Based Search site where the URL's are built dynamically based on the User input Parameters

Currently I use the '=' t o built the URL based on the search parameters

for eg:

/condition=New/keywords=Ford+Focus/category=Exterior etc

Is there any value in using hypen's instead of =  ?  Could you please help me in any general guidelines to follow

[igor.pinchevskiy]

Hello,

I would advise you to use a hyphen instead of an equal sign. It looks better when your URL is displayed and in this article from Google's Webmasters http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76329   "We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs."

they recommend using a hyphen instead of an underscore, so I can only assume that a hyphen is definetly a better choice than an equal sign

[irvingw]

I would advise letting the engines to get to every single search URL that users generate. You will be creating many duplicate pages. You can choose to block the engines from getting to any internal search results or perhaps a segment of the search results if they don't conflict with your category pages.

[Dr-Pete]

I'm assuming that Irving means "not letting" (sorry if that's not the case) - spinning out every search into a unique page can definitely cause some problems with thin content. Not sure if that's what you're doing, but I'd tread carefully.

[Dr-Pete]

This is a really weird blend of virtual folder and CGI-style parameters. Typically, we'd see a URL either like:

(1) /page.php?condition=New&keywords=Ford+Focus&category=Exterior

OR

(2) /New/Ford-Focus/Exterior

I think either would be preferable to what you have. By using the hybrid style, Google isn't going to understand how to interpret your URLs, and it could lead to some minor SEO problems. I don't think it'll disrupt crawling or anything huge, but it's always dicey to use strange URL formats. If you can move to something like (2), I really think that's preferable, but even the longer (1) style would probably be safer.

Honestly, though, I've never seen this style of URL in the wild, so I'm making an educated guess here. I just find that different isn't always good, in these cases.