best character to use as seperator

I would like your thoughts on what characters are best as seperators (spaces) in a url
'-' vs '+' vs '_' or '%20'

I heard that google dont see _ as a seperator, but is there a difference between the rest?
thanks

 

I heard, so don't hold me to it..... %20 (a blank space) is a tip off to G and other SE's that it's a query string. Therefore, not giving it much weight as an actual web page for serps.

Now comes personal choice. I've seen keywords seperated by - & _ seem to behave simular in serps, so I make my directorys us _ while my file names use - This way I can quickly tell the difference in the logs.

Now did any of what I typed make sense?

hth,

tom

 

For no specific 'scientific' reason, I do the same.

 

i seem to remember googleguy suggesting that he would use "-" over "_"
just do some searches on google which include the seperators you're considering in the search string, you can see the difference pretty easily

on the other hand, it's assumed that the search engines pick up on excessive hyphenation as a tip off for over SEOing a site

 

I tested this a while ago. Google doesn't recognise _ as a separator, so use a - to be safe.

 

i use to use _ but i now use - for file names etc since it is also better for site visiters since sometimes _ (underscores) are hard to see in the address bar and look like they are a space.

 

Ok, so we can agree '-' is better than underscore.
and apparantly %20 is no good either
how about '+' (a plus sign)?

 

To me the '+' sign looks technical, '-' looks more natural.

I believe the latter is the best option as far as readability is concerned also.

 

I wouldn't be sure about how Google would read it, I'd advise against using it, stick with '-' there's no need to overcomplicate things.

 

FYI, our site uses _ and an example URL below that is nested 4 deep has the same PR as our home page (PR4).

http://www.mostpopularsites.net/mtree/Games/MUDS/Age_of_Chaos.html

 

It might have the same PR, but is google seeing the keywords in the file name.

 

It sure is!

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=most+popular+sites+age++chaos&btnG=Search

Look at entry #10 (10 on my search, so look around #10ish)

 

Yes, Google won't recognise those as seperate words, it'll look like AgeofChaos.html to the spiders

 

I have seen "evidence" in a french forum that the - win over the _ regarding serps! A guy had studied the case...

But... it is almost 1 year old! I prefer the -, but really can't say about these so called "evidence".

 

Yeah I checked it myself, I made up some nonsense pagenames, somthing like saklhgkh_fihoifhoif and saklhgkh-fihoifhoif, had the term nowhere else on the page and waited for them to be spidered. When search ing for saklhgkh fihoifhoif, only the page using - was returned, the other wasn't recognised as a separator.

 

Googleguy has said on different occasions that the hyphen ("-") is the preferred choice for seperating file and page names. The underscore ("_") is counted as a character whilst the hyphen is counted as a delimiter. Anything else is just noise.

 

Yep. There is always lots of debate about this. "-" Is the character to use.

Although G can read somethingthathasnospacestoo and is even doing this for searches and onpage content.