I was just wondering, putting underscores or hyphens in filename help in SERPs anymore? Hyphens are considered as spaces by google, but does it really help? Is any SE penalizing for using too much hyphens or underscores in filename?
Hyphens are NOT considered as spaces. Try to search: 1- Hello-World (111,000,000) 2- Hello World (12,600,000) I think you shouldn't go for more than 3 hypens in your domain name. But for file name, try not to go too much with hyphens. Hope that helps Toby
WEll its the best alternative when you really need spaces or the file name gets too messy, i pick hyphens over underscores.
I am particularly talking baout the hyphens in file names: Let say you want to search for a filename on one of my website allcookierecipes.com for the filename/category shortbread-cookie-recipes Searched for filename shortbread-cookie-recipes http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=site%3Aallcookierecipes.com+shortbread-cookie-recipes Searched for filename shortbread cookie recipes http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=site%3Aallcookierecipes.com+shortbread+cookie+recipes These both earches yeild the similar results. And this the exact result on Yahoo as well. My question really is, will the hyphens help? ATM they are'nt making nay difference in search results. And which is better hyphen or underscore? Or maybe theres no difference whether you use underscore or hyphen. I think SEs treat them both equally !!!!
I wrote a short article covering the subject a few months ago : Google - Words and Separators In summary : - hyphens are ok (but MSN does not like to see too many of them in a URL) - combine them with commas if you need many separators - avoid underscores and spaces (%20) Jean-Luc
Matt Cutts says hyphens are better but I find no difference when using hyphens or underscores (if there's any difference, it's too subtle I think and could easily be overridden by other seo factors). though I would admit, I am using hyphens almost all the time now
There has been several threads in this forum about this topic. Do a search and you will find some good info on the subject. - sorry im too lazy to find the thread for you. :/
I also have seen no difference when it comes to SEO. But I think the reason he said that is maybe because an _ can mess up spiders thus causing a problem.
I've seen a few sites using the + is a seperator and it seems to work very well for them. This is particulary the case with cart sites, particulary zen cart, where URLs are messy and you need a mod to make the urls spiderable and half resepctable.
I am building a huge website (around 100k pages), i have been using underscores earlier, so i wanted to switch to hyphens. I think i would try hyphens, makes URL looks a little better as well, and also from what i've gathered, hyphens and considered as spaces by google so i think hyphens would be definetely better than underscores.
I've recently switched page names from using underscores to using hyphens, and used 301s to redirect any traffic that wants to access the pages by their old names. Before this I VERY rarely got traffic from search engines, but now might get a few visitors each day via search engines. (MSN and Google - Yahoo isn't giving me anything...) I'm not completely convinced that this was due to the underscores to hyphens change, but it seems plausible.