What do dashes look like to Google?

[tim27487]

Simple question.

If I'm writing a description for my website (which usually shows up in the search results). Does Google recognise dashes in-between keyword phrases as being spaces?

E.g Is "bird cage training" the same as "bird-cage-training" according to Google?

In other words will these dashes affect my keyword phrases in the description from an SEO point of view?

Thanks

[karlp295]

well cant answer the question exactly unless you are talking about website addresses where the dashes would be seen as seperation words in the address. Underscore is a space. In titles or descriptions I know that a dash is counted as a word. Hope this helps a little and would be glad to see what others say...

[bgmacaw]

What's important to Google is links, especially links where the anchor text keywords match the url, title meta tag, header tags and LSI of the other content. Dashes are pretty much ignored these days from what I've observed and heard.

Now, if you're up against birdcagetraining.com and they have more and higher quality anchored links with that keyword they'll win. Your site will win if the situation is reversed. If you're about even on links then it gets a bit more nebulous but typically the older, established, domain wins and that most often is the one without the dashes.

If you're up against genericsupplycompany.com once again it's down to anchored links, quality and quantity. If they have more, they win, if you do, you win. However, when things are even, unless the other site has tremendous authority in the niche, you'll probably win out on the basis of your keyword URL.

[mikemcmillan]

When Google deep probes your page's text it strips out all of the HTML, punctuation, and many of the suffixes or word endings. A dash in the text will be seen as a space. An underscore connects the two words adjoining it. For example (bird cages) and (bird-cages) will be seen as the same thing. However, (bird_cages) will be seen as one single word.

[Trieu]

I downloaded the official guide for google recently, and it states it is better if you put keywords seperated with hyphens (or dashes) in the url, than mashing to together

such as www.mysite.com/bird-cage-training

[Catalin Ionescu]

Here's how Google treats dashes found in text; it's near the bottom of the page:

Using Web Search : More Search Help - Web Search Help

Elsewhere I recall reading dashes are treated pretty much like spaces when found in the URL itself.

There were countless debates a while ago if - all other conditions equal - a domain like goldnuggets.com would rank better than gold-nuggets.com. There was no definitive conclusion to this, and I assume this would be the case today too...

However many specialists recommend using dashes to separate words in your site URLs, such as yourdomain.com/gold-nuggets/ and not underscores.

- Catalin

[Justin Michie]

I always thought underscores were the same as spaces and dashes were the same as stuffing the words together for things like html files names...

[Catalin Ionescu]

Justin, here's an excellent summary by Matt Cutts -- Dashes vs. underscores

And another yet relevant thread, that contains quotes from Adam Lasnik (Google employee), and various evidence from experiments -- dash or underscore - has this changed?

- Catalin

[Justin Michie]

Ahh, so that's what I've been doing wrong all these years

[Roy Carter]

Justin, I'd say you were probably doing something right

Wondered about this myself in the past. Thanks for the info Catalin.

[BlueJam]

The problem with using underscores is that they can't be seen in links, eg does_this_have an _underscore.com? So can be easily copied down wrong if they person isn't a little technically minded.