I’m not trying to play SEO pro here, but I’m going to close out the email questions I got from my first URL optimization post while I wait for some podcasts to download.
Q. Are you drunk?
A. No.
Q. Didn’t you say underscores were the way to go?
A. No. Well, not if we had that conversation in the last 3 years.
I use underscores for non-HTML filenames, functions, ids and classes. I use hyphens throughout URLs. The rationale [for hyphens in urls] comes from the way Google handles dashes as word separators and underscores as punctuation.
A relative URL like “/products/canon-slr-digital-camera” will be indexed by Google in such a way that a search for “Canon camera” would still match since it reads the hyphens as spaces. Underscores are different. The same pagename / URL with underscores (i.e., /products/canon_slr_digital_camera) would require an exact match search for “canon_slr_digital_camera” to match.
It sounds like that might be changing in the near future…
A few months back, Matt Cutts was rumored to have said that underscores would soon be treated as word separators just as dashes are now. It was later disputed and then clarified (kind of) in a post where Cutts finishes by noting he did say “if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes.”
Okay, my podcast is ready. Aa, out.
4 Responses to “URL SEO, PIII, underscores v. hyphens”
People must really be fired up about this topic for it to require 3 posts. I have always been of the opinion, make websites that were worth going to, don’t depend on google’s indexing algorithms to make you money. But . . . that is most likely why I am a relatively hard worker and still not rich :)
There is value in SEO, I just don’t think it is worth the amount of effort it takes to keep your information fresh since google goes out of its way to change the formula. I think their philosophy is make websites readable for humans, not machines. But, that is mostly lip service since (depending on your business) your google rank can make you more money.
I am conflicted.
URL optimization isn’t huge. But, I got 7 emails from the posts. As far as I can tell, the reason it’s coming up now is that people are paying attention to the feature sets of CMS / blogging apps. That and I’ve dropped a few verbal opinions on the topic with some new clients who like to fight (you know who you are).
As an aside, I just heard for the first time that our [ep] pagerank helped us land a project. Strange times.
[...] month, I dropped a few posts about url optimization. The reason for three posts was simple – I couldn’t get it [...]