Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Dashes vs. Underscores in Google
By Tony Ruscoe

Following on from Matt’s post a couple of years ago, in which he said that he “would always choose dashes instead of underscores”, it looks like things are about to change at Google as they’ll soon be recognizing underscores as word separators:

One key development that Matt shared with the audience [at WordCamp 2007] was that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. That’s great news, because it historically hasn’t been that way. (...) That meant that in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn’t “see” the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word.
– CNet Tech News blog

Update: Matt Cutts says “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.”

Dashes vs. Underscores in ... by Tony Ruscoe | Comments (16)

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