Sphinn - Google’s Treatment of Underscores vs Hyphens

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Google’s Treatment of Underscores vs Hyphens - The Confusion

Went Hot: December 24, 2007 - 3:47 am
Posted By: UtahSEOpro 561 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchenginejournal.com)
Category: SEO

Back in July, Matt Cutts made the announcement at the Wordpress Wordcamp that underscores are now treated as spaces in Google.

Blogs, webmaster communities, and SEO professionals rejoiced – but why does it seem Google DOES NOT treat underscores and hyphens the same.

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from qwerty 561 days ago #

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As noted in the article, Matt backed off a bit from that statement in August:

If you read Stephan Spencer's write-up, some people thought 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.

from g1smd 561 days ago #

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*** Back in July, Matt Cutts made the announcement at the Wordpress Wordcamp that underscores are now treated as spaces in Google. ***

He didn't say that at all. He certainly didn't say "now".

He said that Google were probably going to be considering how these things worked in the future.

from MattCutts 559 days ago #

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What g1smd said. I said that we were looking at treating underscores as separators in urls, but some people took that to mean that it was a done deal when it wasn't.

from g1smd 559 days ago #

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Merry Christmas Matt!

Personally, I'd prefer if it stayed the way it has been for years, as it is useful for code searches.

from JacobKerr 557 days ago #

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Well that's good to know. I'm glad I stuck with using dashes instead of underscores, even though I heard through the grape vine that both underscores and dashes were treated the same I had the feeling that they were not :).

Take care and thanx for keeping us up-to-date,

Jacob Kerr