How many hyphens are allowed in page titles or image names?

[SeobyKP]

When I was going through certification, I was told it should be limited to one or two. I was curious if there is a change.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi KP

There really is no limit but URL's with many hyphens tend to look spammy.

Remember the old days of long partial match URLs? www.cheap-car-insurance-for-u.com? and suchlike? They just look really crappy. If you really must use one in the TLD then limit it to one.

For Pages & Posts, it's quite common to see more use of hyphens. I'm editor at a music blog and it's quite common to see for example:

sitename.com/the-rolling-stones-manchester-live-review It looks natural even though there is a stop word in the URL because 'The' is actually part of the Stones' name

You will get a warning in Moz because of the long URL but it will not stop it ranking well, at all!

For images, it depends on how descriptive you want it to be. If the image was of Mick Jagger in Manchester then the image URL could easily be sitename**/mick-jagger-manchester-old-trafford** and then the Title or Alt text tag would be 'Mick Jagger - Manchester - Old Trafford, so highly descriptive with a couple of hyphens and great for image SEO.

So it's up to you really - the more descriptive the better. Ignore warnings of long URLs unless they are stupidly long and focus on enhancing the ranking of the page rather than worry about minutiae.

Now:

If you are talking about Meta Titles then it's common to use a variety of separators such as a hyphen (-) or a bar (|). In that case, it's fairly simple as you need Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword - Sitename so they are often limited to just two.

I think the more you use them the less space there is for Keywords and it's important with a limited length (60-70 characters) to get those in as a priority. The hyphen takes up 3 characters so they are largely a waste of space.

I hope that helps

Regards Nigel

[Seenlyst]

Hello there,

If you're talking about the name of image files such as jpg and png where hyphens are used as space (just like you did on page url), there's really no limit given by Google, so my advice would be not to over optimize those image files by stuffing your keywords in it (ie, keyword1-keyword2-keyword3-keyword4.jpg), just make it natural (puppy-food.jpg) instead.

As for Page Titles like Gaston suggested to use it as a separator (personally I prefer | or : ), and again there's no actual limit given by Google, but the key here is to make sure these are optimized for your visitor then only Google. Just make sure they're natural then you should be fine.

Hope this helps,

Joseph Yap

[GastonRiera]

Hi there!

There is no such restriction on the amount of hyphens. Usually there are one or two, used as separators in titles. Never seen them in image titles.

Hope it helps.
Best luck.
GR.