Subdomain spacing, does it really matter?

[turbolapp]

There was a discussion about this a few months back but of course I can't find it.

Does it really matter the way you do your spacing in a sub domain?

example:

birthday_parties.specialoccasions.com
or
birthday-parties.specialoccasions.com
or
birthdayparties.specialoccasions.com

 

[montydad5000]

I will preface this by saying that I am, in no way, an expert on this subject. I'll just tell you about my experience.

The only 3 or 4 times that I tried using hyphens or underscores in my subdomain name, Google either hit that PPC campaign with low QS and $5 - $10 clicks OR they wouldn't give me any impressions.

I am now just using no spacing at all (/birthdayparties) and seem to be doing just fine.

Maybe it was something else about those campaigns, but they were really no different than my other pages (content, about us, privacy, etc).

Just my $0.02.

 

[Gumby!]

Use no spacing when you can, a dash when you have to (really only applies to the domain name, not sub-domain), and never use an underscore

 

[Chris R Motive]

I always try to stick with domains without hyphens or spaces, I have noticed that the clicks were way more expensive but I have no idea if the spaces had anything to do with it.

 

[finspin]

I always use dashes to separate two words in a subdomain. I do it for the legibility purposes. Here is what Matt Cutts has to say about dashes and underscores:

If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says some people thought that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.

Source: Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers

Note that the above quote is almost a year. Things could have changed since then.

 

[erect]

I always use dashes to separate two words in a subdomain. I do it for the legibility purposes.

^^ best advice

 

[Gumby!]

I always use dashes to separate two words in a subdomain. I do it for the legibility purposes. Here is what Matt Cutts has to say about dashes and underscores:

If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says some people thought that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.

Source: Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers

Note that the above quote is almost a year. Things could have changed since then.

That quote concerns filenames not subdomains

A subdomain is considered to be part of the domain and, as with
a domain name, keywordphrase.tld beats keyword-phrase.tld in SEO.

Underscores are not valid in domain names and shouldn't be used in subdomains