Hi There,

We are in the process of revamping our URL structure and my devs tell me they have a technical problem using a hyphen as a word separator. There's a whole lot of competing recommendations out there and at this point I'm just confused.

Does anyone have any idea what character would be next-best to the hyphen for separating words in a URL? Any reason to prefer one over another?

Some links I've found discussing the topic:

• This page says that "__Google has confirmed that the point (.), the comma (,) and the hyphen (-) are valid word separators in URL’s.": http://www.internetofficer.com/seo/google-word-separator/
• This page suggests the plus (+) symbol would be best: http://labs.phurix.net/posts/word-separators-in-urls
• This guy says he's tested and there's a whole bunch of symbols that will work as word separators: http://www.webproguide.com/articles/Symbols-as-word-separators-a-look-inside-the-search-engine-logic/

I'm leaning towards the tilde (~) or the plus (+) sign. Usage would be like so: http://www.domain.com/shop/sterling~silver OR /shop/sterling+silver etc...

Thanks in advance for your help!

Hey George,

Problem is that I can't use hyphens (-) and need an alternative... Unless you mean dashes like mdash and ndash? (i.e. – and —) Wasn't sure if those characters were okay for URLs and whether they are recognized as separators by google...