Internal page naming

I have been naming my internal pages like this: thishasfourwords.htm

Is there any SEO benefit in naming internal pages using "dashes" to seperate keywords, like this-has-four-words.htm

If there is a benefit, and I decided to change the names to include the dashes, I would not want to break all of the existing backlinks that link to the old page. How would I get the old page to forward to the new page without losing juice?

bigleftie <---

If you do a 301 redirect for the old pages...

thishasfourwords.htm --> 301 --> this-has-four-words.html (or whatever)

Then no.. your not loosing any link juice.

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The direct benefit to the naming structure is the -link -a- bility- of the page.

If your actually doing some natural link building...

then just think about it from the user perspective.

Google is smart enough to tell the semantics out of the spacing.

What is more important is that you actually want to rank for that keyword...

and if Google already has pages cached with your old linking structure.


Do a search of your site on google...

site:yourdomain.com


Good Luck!

dashes beat underscores for sure. Matt Cutts in an interview said that dashes are preferred for URL slugs.

Much appreciated fellas!

Once again, your replies reminded me that in the end ... we aren't trying to impress GOOGLE with our sites. We are trying to impress GOOGLE and the PEOPLE on the Internet. I guess it's hard to lose focus sometimes - but, the more I read it in these forums the more it's becoming "the way I think".

I'm in the process of renaming the pages to include the dashes.