How Google Handles Underscores

[peter_d]

I missed this snippet a few days back, so just in case there's anyone else who missed it:

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-974....html?tag=head

One key development that Matt shared with the audience was that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. That's great news, because it historically hasn't been that way. Back in 2005, Matt stated that Google did not view underscores in URLs as word separators. That meant that in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn't "see" the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word. I wouldn't recommend targeting "iphone_review" as a keyword, as I doubt anyone will be including an underscore in their Google query.

[The American Voters]

That is very cool... All of our articles use underscores to separate words as the title of the article is the name of the page.

[harsha22]

Lets hope Yahoo, MSN & other search engines treat the Underscores in the same way.

[peterko]

It's better later than never. What else I can say.

A few years ago I made mistake by using underscores for my URLs, simply because I didn't have appropriate information, so, when someone told me that the search engines can't separate words with underscore, I changed them on hyphens. It took them a little while untill the new URLs were indexed again but it helped with SEO.

Now I could say to the beginners, try to use hyphens instead underscores, don't wait untill Google makes the changes. do whatever is currently in value. But, if you already using underscores, then let the new information from the postings above makes you feel better.

Have a great day,
Peter

[The American Voters]

That's good advice. The only problem is it's set up like this for numerous articles. With good titles for the page and keywords on the page that represent the article as well it shouldn't be an issue, just will be a plus once it gets switched over.

[Julie]

Thanks for pointing that out. I also missed it the news.

[The American Voters]

So is it currently working this way? THe article was very vague on a ETA.

[WorldwideTrading]

Originally Posted by harsha22

Lets hope Yahoo, MSN & other search engines treat the Underscores in the same way.

Wasnt it just google that didnt?

[coolguy27]

Nice post there Pete..

Now underscores is now treated as separators in Google. Will Yahoo and MSN follow the process?

[toinkzzz]

i don't think yahoo and msn follows with google coz they'll have their different recognitions and algos.. but theres always a possibility..

[Cricket]

Interesting response from Matt ...

If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whiteh...-for-bloggers/

[eshop600]

So are dashes still the way to go? I thought google deffo treats dashes as space?

[Malok]

Thanks for the heads up.