mod rewrite url format

Does anyone know if the format you use to rewrite urls makes a difference to the search engines?

For example:

www.somedomain.com/binary-safety-switch/252/

www.somedomain.com/binary-safety-switch-252.html

Is one better than the other? Does it make a difference?

The format of URLs is very important in SEO, but both formats you suggested are fine, but I will give you my opinion anyway...

/binary-safety-switch/252/ means your page is inside a directory, not in the root of the website. You should only do this if /binary-safety-switch/ itself is a page.

/binary-safety-switch-252.html is technically incorrect - extensions should only be 3 characters long (hence, .htm). But even then, I think the whole idea that search engines prefer .htm pages is rubbish. Maybe 5 years ago, yes, but now-a-days, SEs don't care if a page is dynamic or not, and in fact, everybody knows that having a htm extension doesn't mean a page is static... I have SEO'd and monitored sites with and without .htm extension and I can honestly say there is not difference. .htm is just a waste of precious bytes...

/binary-safety-switch-252/ is the best format in my opinion: keywords first, junk (if you must have it) last.

The ideal would obviously be /binary-safety-switch/ (or as some might argue: /binary+safety+switch/). Again, this is another myth that hasn't really been proven. Nobody knows for sure whether + are better than +. + is the official symbol for space, which makes me think it may be the safe option, but I personally choose not to use any characters that require a shift to be typed: you type + by pressing **** and =.

But that's just me...

That's a great answer, I did not know about the +.

The urls are dynamically generated so I think I will switch to /binary+safety+switch+252/.

Unfortunetly I need the "rubish" at the end...

Dunno about anyone else, but personally whenever I see + in a url it just makes me think of a search query.

I agree, I much prefer dashes (-) instead of pluses.
Looks a lot cleaner to me

Are there any other negatives besides the aesthetics to using the +?

If it is semantically correct it makes sense to use it and would a visitor leave a site that has the content they are looking for but they do not like how the urls are formatted…

I find hyphens more readable.

As Spinal says, there's no good evidence that it matters either way. Google seems perfectly capable of picking up words spaced with hyphens, so I use that.

Hey guy, I agree with everything everyone has said so far about hyphens, but there are 2 very important point you need to be aware of:

point #1. Google indexes hyphenated words and treats them separately to 'spaced' words:
Example: "post-war europe" and "post war europe" have different results.

Unlike: "xmas trees london" and "christmas tree london" where the results are pretty much exactly the same. Google handles the ambiguity of Xmas and Christmas and I don't have to wory about it as an SEO - my site is 1st and 2nd when you use "xmas", but the word never (or hardly ever) appears on the website...

The idea is behind this (we'll need this in a minute), because the SE sees "Christmas" and "Xmas" as the same thing, being a string match for "Christmas" automatically ranks you for "xmas". If I'd actively tried to match both words, I'd end up being a weaker match for both (ie.: with less emphasis on both).

When you are faced with ambiguity, your best option is to make your content very "un-ambiguous" (if that's even a word) and leave the SE to deal with it. It's in the SE's best interest to overcome the ambiguity for the benefit of its users and to improve the quality of its results.

But would this work for hyphenated phrases like "post war" and "post-war"?

And that's what leads me to...
point #2: Let's assume you were to write an article about post-war europe (convenient). You could use the following URLs (from which the SE might extract the following phrases

Let's say you use - and leave the SE to worl out where the 'actual spaces' are:
a) /post-war-europe/ -->
1.post war europe, 2.post-war europe, 3.post war-europe, 4.post-war, 5.post war, 6.war-europe, 7.war europe, 8.post, 9.war, 10.europe.

Let's say you use + everywhere, so you're being specific about the spaces:
b) /post+war+europe/ --> 1.post war europe, 2.post war, 3.war europe, 4.post, 5.war, 6.europe. (no hyphenated words)
This way I have reduced the number of phrases that can be derived from the url. But if SEs treat "post-war" and "post war" as 2 separate words, I will be more strongly matched to "post war" and less of a match for "post-war" than the url used in the first example.

Now let's say you use hyphens, but you are specific about the spaces:
c) /post-war+europe/ -->
post-war europe (the natural result),
post war europe, (alternative where - is replaced with a space)
post-war, post war, war europe, europe, post, war, europe.
Because I was specific about hyphens and spaces, no emphasis should be given to "post war-europe", "war-europe". I've reduced the number of phrases that can be derived from the url and focused on the phrases that do matter "post-war ..." and "post war ...".

Going back to my "Xmas/Christmas" example - that worked really well because I made sure to put all emphasis on one of the phrases, but I don't think you could use the same technique on hyphenated phrases (at least the ones I checked) because SEs treat them as separated phrases.

Food for thought guys...

That's a good point.

(And the word is "unambiguous" )

LOL, I actually got it wrong twice (I wrote un-umbiguous) - got mixed up with the 'u's