Hyphens & Underscores to be treated equally in Google - expect turbulence
Tuesday, 24 July 2007
Via Seroundtable.
Until today, Google treated dashes and underscores in the URL differently. A dash (hyphen) between two words in the URL (i.e. keyword-phrase) would tell Google that those are two different words (i.e. keyword +phrase). In the past, an underscore between two words in a URL (i.e. keyword_phrase) would tell Google that those words are a single word (i.e. keywordphrase). Now both underscores and hyphens in the URL are treated as word separators.
The Matt Cutts comments at World Camp didn't let on precisely when this did or will go live, supposedly around now, but expect some turbulence in the SERPs (serpulance) mostly coming from old underscore based sites suddenly getting an upword boost.
I saw some statistical research (data pulled from thousands of SERPs) a while back which showed hyphens may have a negative effect in SERPs, and that it's better to keep words together.
This was in an old James Brausch product - "Ranking Factors" I think it was called. I think the data is still regularly updated, and is part of the RaSof software now.
Having said that (about it being better to keep words together) I've seen some dozens of bad domain names...
Like "Pen Island", "Mole Station Nursery" (childcare), and "Speed Of Art". ;)
Posted by: John McKinnon | Thursday, 26 July 2007 at 10:55 AM
SPEEDOFART is quite a well known and humourous example of why hyphens may be very appropriate.
Posted by: Teddie | Friday, 27 July 2007 at 04:14 PM
I thinks this is a good choice that Google made. I'm not expecting many changes...
Posted by: Ernesto | Thursday, 16 August 2007 at 03:59 PM