Orangescale.NET

Jul 26, 2007 / 4:01 pm

Google reads underscores as word separators

in WWW, Webdev

I am a dashes-separator follower in URI. That’s why in my Movable Type-powered blog I use dashes for entry basename separators. Movable Type (until MT 3.35 version) uses underscore as entry basename instead of dashes.

There was a big controvercy controversy. Which one is better: dashes or underscore? And, I think more people will choose dashes. Related to blogging, many blogging platform offers the use of dashes in their nice permalink structure.

The next Movable Type release (at least in Movable Type 4 Beta), dashes come to the first option in the permalink structure link, for SEO-friendly reasons. But, let’s read what Matt Cutts said about how Google reads underscores. Now, Google proclaims that: underscores are now word separators.

One key development that Matt shared with the audience 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. Back in 2005, Matt stated that Google did not view underscores in URLs as word separators. 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. I wouldn’t recommend targeting “iphone_review” as a keyword, as I doubt anyone will be including an underscore in their Google query. (read more Underscores are now word separators, proclaims Google — written by Stephan Spencer)

There are some other interesting information:

• Matt claims that Google treats URLs with a query string the same as static URLs.
• The number of slashes in your URL (i.e. the number of directories deep your page is) isn’t a factor in your Google rankings.
• The file extension in your URL won’t affect your rankings. So it’s inconsequential whether you use .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .jsp etc. The one extension you should avoid for your Web documents? .exe.
• How to get one’s blog into Google News, Matt shared one of Google’s requirements for inclusion: the blog must have multiple authors. So those of you wanting your blog showing up in Google News results, I hope it’s a group blog!

Great! Anyway, what about other search engines like Yahoo! or MSN? No further info. As I use Google as my primary search engine, it IS a good news!

Read also: Dashes vs. underscores by Matt Cutts.

• July 26th, 2007 • # 4:01 pm