Comments on: Google Still Not Treating Underscores As Word Separators

By: PPCblogger

PPCblogger — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:37:47 +0000

Hi James,

+ signs are used quite often in dynamic urls and I have a couple of clients who use them in url strings for product pages etc.

Google can certainly crawl and index these urls, but they do not act as word separators.

Hyphens are the best way to go.

By: JameSEO

JameSEO — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:54:52 +0000

I really appreciate the test. I too have been wondering about this for some time now. Have you already written a post on “+” signs. I tend to use them when appending URL’s for Gogole Analytics. What’s you take on “+” signs and SEO?

By: philip

philip — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:16:33 +0000

thanks for the advice Keith

By: Keith

Keith — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:09:10 +0000

Two different urls, would mean two different pages without redirection.

Not always as you can apend parameters to a url strings, but in this sense they would be technically two separate pages and treated separately by the search engines.

By: philip

philip — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:04:03 +0000

thanks for your reply.

I thought it would be possible to point two different urls at the same page just the same as if you had a website but with .com and co.uk both linking to the same page

i run ppc accounts, i have done since i left school but have very little understanding of seo.

my clients are asking me these sort of questions and i am just bumbling through, trying to expand my knowlege, this site is informative and helpful.

By: PPCblogger

PPCblogger — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:04:04 +0000

If you created a new link with hyphens it would be a different page.

If you put the same content on that page, you would have duplicate content and Google probably wouldn’t index the new page unless you change the link profiles of each page etc. You wouldn’t want a duplicate page anyway.

Good point regarding Yahoo and MSN, I always have a go at others for concentrating on just Google ;).

MSN take a year or so to index new pages, so this was a rather quick and limited test to Google.

Will update at somepoint with the others!.

By: philip

philip — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:37:03 +0000

Would it make any difference if you had an existing page using underscores and created a new link with hyphens pointing to the same page?

Can this be done and would it be picked up at all by Google.

And does anyone know if msn and yahoo are the same as google in this respect.

I would be interested in knowing of some more detailed and conclusive tests.

By: Paid Search Services

Paid Search Services — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:13:29 +0000

I have been working in SEO/PPC for 2 years and have always wondered about this. Many thanks for the test, it has helped a great deal with domain and URL strategy.

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:28:57 +0000

I have seen this for a while, we normally have better SEO results using dashes…

By: PPCblogger

PPCblogger — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:34:36 +0000

Google have been doing this for sometime -

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/minty-fresh-indexing/