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- or _ ?

by NewbiesDiary
11 replies
I discovered something quite interesting - possibly you already knew about this, but thought I'd share anyway...

Google reads " - " as a space, but doesn't read " _ " at all.

So if you have warrior-forum-rocks-the-big-one then Google will read " warrior forum rocks the big one ", but if you have warrior_forum_rocks_the_big_one then google will read it as " warriorforumrocksthebigone "

Interesting hey!
  • Profile picture of the author NewbiesDiary
    yeah I was actually surprised at the difference - I had no idea.

    The problem is I have ALWAYS used _ so for seo I now have to change them all!!
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    • Profile picture of the author Ron Douglas
      Originally Posted by NewbiesDiary View Post

      yeah I was actually surprised at the difference - I had no idea.

      The problem is I have ALWAYS used _ so for seo I now have to change them all!!
      I thought the search engines were sophisticated enough to decipher that

      "warriorforumrocksthebigone" is "warrior forum rocks the big one"

      I don't think you need to change anything.
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      • Profile picture of the author John Henderson
        From what I've been reading, Stef's absolutely right; dashes should be used, but underscores should not.

        Originally Posted by Ron Douglas View Post

        I thought the search engines were sophisticated enough to decipher that

        "warriorforumrocksthebigone" is "warrior forum rocks the big one"

        I don't think you need to change anything.
        "While Google can distinguish and separate words without spaces from each other pretty well, some other search engines are not so clever"
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  • Profile picture of the author Richard A.Cox
    So it reads dash's but not underscores?


    Interesting.
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    • Profile picture of the author radhika
      It has been told by search engine gurus that the urls should contain hyphens instead of undescrores to seperate words. This is taken by search engines as SEPERATE words and make sense to them (and easy to read by humans too)

      .
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  • Profile picture of the author tj
    Originally Posted by NewbiesDiary View Post

    I discovered something quite interesting - possibly you already knew about this, but thought I'd share anyway...

    Google reads " - " as a space, but doesn't read " _ " at all.

    So if you have warrior-forum-rocks-the-big-one then Google will read " warrior forum rocks the big one ", but if you have warrior_forum_rocks_the_big_one then google will read it as " warriorforumrocksthebigone "

    Interesting hey!
    Any proof?

    Timo
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    • Profile picture of the author NewbiesDiary
      Originally Posted by tj View Post

      Any proof?

      Timo
      ummm - I'm not claiming I own the Sydney Harbour Bridge! LOL

      But yeah I read it on a blog a couple of weeks ago and they had done some extensive testing on this - you could always search it.

      Try googling it - underscore hyphen seo - you'll find 13,000 results!

      Certainly isn't a big issue here - if you wanna use underscores - go right ahead - no skin off my nose
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    • Profile picture of the author John Henderson
      Originally Posted by tj View Post

      Any proof?
      "You absolutely should not use underscores. Matt Cutts has confirmed on his blog that Google does not recognise underscores as equivalent to spaces between words."
      - from page 76, 'Get to the top on Google', David Viney
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      • Profile picture of the author Lanadili
        As I was reading this post, I remembered reading something about this awhile back, but not actually doing anything about it.

        Now I feel like I should do something about it, especially since I just checked and my competition is using this and I want to stay ahead of the game. So I searched around, and confirmed that for re-directing pages, using htaccess 301 redirects would be the best bet.

        My question is, is there a limit in htaccess for how many 301 redirects you can have? I have about 150 pages on my site. Also, when is it a good time to go back into your htaccess and remove all those re-directs? 30 days? 60 days?
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  • Profile picture of the author ToTellAStory
    LOLs... I never liked underscores anyway...
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  • Profile picture of the author Brawnydt
    Thankfully google can also also differentiate that chunk of words too. So bluewidgetredwidgetgreenwidget will still be searched for blue, green, and red widgets respectively.

    That's why you can put your keyword or longtail in a url w/o hyphens and not have to worry.
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