Dashes and Underscores Matter in Search

Date Posted: July 2025

When Fynd looks at a website and tries to understand the words, even small things like dashes and underscores can make a big difference.

Let’s say a page uses the words hello-world. Fynd sees that as two words: hello and world. But if the page uses hello_world with an underscore, Fynd sees that as one big word: hello_world. That means if someone searches for just hello, they might find the page with a dash, but not the one with an underscore.

This happens because Fynd, like many search engines, breaks up words when it sees dashes. But it keeps the whole thing together when it sees underscores.

So, if you’re making a website and want people to find it more easily, it is better to use dashes instead of underscores in your links and file names. It helps both people and the Fynd crawler understand what your content is really about.

We want Fynd to be smart and fair, so we are always looking at ways to improve how we handle stuff like this behind the scenes.