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Matt Cutts posted several pointers from his WordCamp 2007 talk, including some more commentary about underscores versus dashes for URL formats.

Cutts: I'd Still Pick Dashes

Once the PR types at Google finished giving Matt's presentation slides a review, he posted the WordCamp 2007 presentation to his blog. His discussion listed a few SEO tips for bloggers to consider.

Matt doesn't just toss out the PowerPoint slides for one's review. He's got video of his talk. He's got a lengthy transcript. He's got links to a trio of summaries of his presentation.

All that's missing are paparazzi photos of Matt drinking a Diet Sprite while surfing the web.

He brought up the topic of underscores in URLs again. It seems his earlier points about them need some clarification, which he duly blogged about in his post:

If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says 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.

Dashes are best, and underscores are second-best. For the purposes of SEO, no spaces would be the worst choice.

His presentation (PPT file) has plenty of useful tips for bloggers who want to climb the search engine results mountain. As a WordCamp talk, a few tips specifically concern the WordPress platform, but many apply to any blog.