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I finally figured out why my inner pages wont rank

by arttse
19 replies
  • SEO
    • |
...because I use underscores instead of dashes

Dashes vs. underscores

Can any SEO expert confirm or deny this theory?
#figured #finally #pages #rank
  • Profile picture of the author RGallowitz
    That makes sense, because if you don't want google to index a folder or file, simply add an underscore in front of it. Works a treat for me at least.
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  • Profile picture of the author Arun Kumar
    I would highly recommend to add dashes than underscores and I agree that, adding underscores is a negative point for the ranking.
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  • Profile picture of the author Zeus66
    If I had to guess about why this is, it's all those spammy pages programs like Traffic Equalizer used to pump out in the tens of thousands. Google finally got fed up with the crap and probably just went after that kind of obvious footprint. Just a guess.
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    • Profile picture of the author TheRichLife
      I have some inner pages on a site that have underscores. The pages have PRs of 1, 2, and 3. They also rank well for their targeted long tail keyword. It's possible that they could rank better with hyphens, but I hate to mess with them at this point to test that theory.
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      • Profile picture of the author ajldomains
        Originally Posted by TheRichLife View Post

        I have some inner pages on a site that have underscores. The pages have PRs of 1, 2, and 3. They also rank well for their targeted long tail keyword. It's possible that they could rank better with hyphens, but I hate to mess with them at this point to test that theory.
        This is exactly what I was going to say..

        This is interesting but I have pages on my site that rank well on G and they have underscores. I have both. I used to use underscores but now use dashes on all my pages (subconciously). Never really paid attention to it. Possibly because I used Frontpage before and saved my own pages and now I use XsitePro which puts dashes for me.

        This is an aged site so i don't know if that has anything to do with it. I don't want to change them becuase they rank well and pull in traffic as a landing page.

        I'm not an SEO expert by any stretch, LOL - but it makes me nervous changing something that ain't broke - even reading this article.
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      • Profile picture of the author Killer Joe
        Originally Posted by TheRichLife View Post

        I have some inner pages on a site that have underscores. The pages have PRs of 1, 2, and 3. They also rank well for their targeted long tail keyword. It's possible that they could rank better with hyphens, but I hate to mess with them at this point to test that theory.

        Holy cow, don't change them now, all the current backlinks would point to a 404 page, and you'd start the indexing process all over again as well as lose any page rank.

        If you duplicated the pages using hyphens instead of underscores, those pages would most likely be put into G's supplemental index. However, from this point forward creating pages using hyphens to separate the keywords would be advisable.

        Google does prefer (according to Matt Cutts) you separate the words in key phrases using hyphens instead of mashing them all together. The example he uses is "experts-exchange" vs "expertsexchange", so Google doesn't parse it as "expert sex change".

        KJ
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        • Profile picture of the author arttse
          I finally figured the real reason why my inner pages to a particular site ranked badly...

          because...I built all my backlinks without the "www" infront of my URL whereas the search engines had indexed my inner pages with the "www" in front of my URL.

          hence, I was building backlinks to the wrong page!!!
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  • Profile picture of the author Istvan Horvath
    Originally Posted by arttse View Post

    Dashes vs. underscores

    Can any SEO expert confirm or deny this theory?
    You are funny...
    SEO expert? What kind of SEO expert do you need? If you quote an article you better spend 2 minutes and read the "About" page of the author
    Matt Cutts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    You got the information from the horse's mouth and you still need confirmation from some self-appointed "experts"?
    (I admit, the article is almost 5 yrs old but it probably is valid even today.)
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  • Profile picture of the author Fraggler
    You can redirect the http://sitename.com to http://www.sitename.com.

    Add this to your .htaccess

    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
    RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    You can also inform Google of the change under Webmaster Tools.
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  • Profile picture of the author forumer147
    Originally Posted by arttse View Post

    ...because I use underscores instead of dashes

    Dashes vs. underscores

    Can any SEO expert confirm or deny this theory?
    Oh I didnt have any idea that placing underscore in the url will prevent google to index it ..I will surely keep this one in mind..It could be the reason too why my blog is not indexing too
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Adams
    Some of the most powerful pages, that rank very high in the SERPS, are Wikipedia pages. All of their pages use underscores for spaces. There is no discernible difference between using dashes or underscore as spaces, and their "ranking power".
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  • Profile picture of the author Lee Wilson
    Lot's of misinterpretation going on here, that article has nothing to do with what's being discussed in this thread. Presuming that info is still up to date, underscores will not stop your page getting indexed and will not affect the ranking. It's purely about how Google reads an underscore. If you are going after a key phrase rather than trying to get searches for individual words within the url, then it should make no difference. There have also been more recent articles where Matt Cutts has said they are getting better at reading them.
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  • Profile picture of the author firstdandy
    Yeah, I have experienced the same thing as well. And know I use dashes in all things. even in all images I use dashes to make those images revel to google image search
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    • Profile picture of the author Adam H
      Originally Posted by Mike Adams View Post

      Some of the most powerful pages, that rank very high in the SERPS, are Wikipedia pages. All of their pages use underscores for spaces. There is no discernible difference between using dashes or underscore as spaces, and their "ranking power".
      Originally Posted by L Wilson View Post

      Lot's of misinterpretation going on here, that article has nothing to do with what's being discussed in this thread. Presuming that info is still up to date, underscores will not stop your page getting indexed and will not affect the ranking. It's purely about how Google reads an underscore. If you are going after a key phrase rather than trying to get searches for individual words within the url, then it should make no difference. There have also been more recent articles where Matt Cutts has said they are getting better at reading them.
      Im glad there are at least 2 people that actually pointed this out , i was getting quite depressed reading this thread that people actually havent got a foggest idea , and they still continue to try and give other people advise based on well...............nothing.
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  • Profile picture of the author System Wide Solutions
    it amazes me how silly some of these threads are.
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  • Profile picture of the author mithil
    Even I read somewhere that using underscore is always better than using hash.
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  • Profile picture of the author jazbo
    The real reason why inner pages will not get indexed is far more simple. Google sets spidering limits, based on a variety of things including PR of referring pages, freshness etc. Bottom line, the more powerful and dynamic your site and the more links you have, the bigger proportion of it that gets spidered and more frequently.
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