Matt Cutts mentioned in his 2005 blog that Google prefers dashes over underscores to separate keywords in URLs. The reason was that G treats "New_York" as one word and will not bring up the page if people search for "New" or "York." Of course people still use keywords in the contents, so this only applies to the importance of keywords in URL. However, has this changed? Many webpages with underscores in file names rank very well these days, so is G treating dashes and underscores equally now? Or those pages rank well because of other things and will rank even better if they use dashes instead of underscores in their URLs? In terms of SEO, I think this should be the correct order: 1. Domain name: NewYork.com > New-York.com > New_York.com 2. File name: New-York.htm > New_York.htm > NewYork.htm Is this still true for Google?
It makes sense in my mind. When does anyone ever use an underscore to write a single word? Seems like google didn't change, it just fixed something that should have been to begin with.
Yes, Google has started to treat the underscore as a space as Matt Cutts has stated in a more recent blog. But I think people are more used to typing a hyphen than an underscore so I would go for the the domain name with a hypen if it is available.
New-York.htm is the correct way as the hyphen is treated as a space. As far as Matt Cutts saying the underscore is being treated differently now is up there with him saying edu links have no special weight.
I think he would know and I dont see why its in his best interests to say otherwise. It seems you dont have much knowledge on the subject, he said edu links only appear to have more power but they only achieve high PR because they are trusted sources and receive alot of inbound links, seems fairly credible to me.
SERP results for meaningless .edu links speak for themselves. Apparently you're new to SEO, and referring to my lack of knowledge when I plainly stated awareness of Matt Cutts position and my opposition to it is petty. Google does or at least has ( not aware of any updates ) treated .edu links in a different light (yes even meaningless .edu's .....sigh), and if you've noticed that or not the subject of using a hyphen to hedge your bet even though Google says it doesn't matter anymore is simple....just play it safe with a hyphen. venturefox can use underscores and be a true believer.
Thanks for the pointer. I searched again and found a recent (7/23/07) CNET blog that talked about Matt Cutts' presentation at WordCamp 2007, and it said: I'll still be using dashes whenever necessary just to be safe, but it is good to know that underscores are fine too, at least to Google.