Words in URLs

well I have had pages using underscore rank quite well, I accept that most people use hyphens but that article didnt go a long way in convincing me of the benifits.
google treats hyphen as a space yes but isnt that the same as putting it in quotes if you follow my meaning.
which means its probably better for the term in the url if your only targeting that but what about the terms in a different order.

I havnt seen conclusive proof yet of any real advantage for hyphens, a lot of talk and some evidence in favour but its a long way from being definitive or even that convincing.

now I accept that there are benifits to hyphens but I would want to be sure there are no drawbacks.

Im going to carry out some tests.

 

Hi,

Here is a proof that underscores are not a good idea for search engine optimization: Google test : hyphen and underscore
Underscore is not recognized by Google as a words separator, whereas the hyphen is a good separator.
Be carefull to understand that the keywords highlighting (with bold) in Google results pages has nothing to do with the ranking algorithm.

Best,
PR Weaver

 

Works for me.

 

That's an interesting statement!

Does Google say that?

 

I also find that interesting, pray tell me how you know that??

 

The point about underscore vs hyphen is that - as a generalisation - search engines erad the hyphen as a space, but not with the underscore.

However, for Google at least, keywords in the URL doesn't count very much, and keyworded internal links on your site will be just as good for getting the meaning across.

Inktomi powered engines such as Yahoo! traditionally took more notice, but Yahoo! is constantly changing, and nothing is certain.

I used to do keyworded URLs all the time, but in the end I found I was simply "over-optimising", and since then, I'll use keyworded top level folders, but anything else is fine as numerical.

Ultimately, my advice would be to create your URLs for human users, but use good internal anchor text to get the right associated meanings for the search engines.

 

Wow that was an experience, thought I was on acid, zplus2 has totally burnt out my eyeballs

Cyclops.