The news that’s been going around lately about Matt Cutts’ recent talk at WordCamp 2007 is "...that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google."
But in an August 10 post about the presentation in which that statement was supposedly made, he clarifies things:
"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."
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But in an August 10 post about the presentation in which that statement was supposedly made, he clarifies things:
"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."
7 Comments
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Phew -- just when I was afraid we could stop talking about the difference. Back to dashes, everyone! And do meta keywords tags need commas? And spaces after each word or not? And...
I have never used underscores. I no longer use dashes. I.much.prefer.to.use.a.dot.between.each.word. It is easy to read. It is treated as a separator. It is easy to say. It means that URLs only contain TWO types of punctuation: "/" and "." in all. I always avoid using underscores or spaces in URLs. They always cause problems. "Dot" is easier to say than "underscore" and "hyphen", and non-web-savvy people seemingly confuse dash and slash all the time.
I’ve found that a ’+’ works a delimited as well.
I liked the suggestion to use all the separators: like-._this-._path-._here.html That’s a joke, btw.
I am gonna answer Dannysullivan here. Meta keywords don’t need commas. Further, the only important search engine that still uses it —according to their own webmaster guidelines— is Yahoo. For the others, keywords are just ignored.
Thanks, Tedel. I was actually joking, but I do appreciate you providing an answer. FYI, for Yahoo, commas are recommended the last time I talked to them. If you have different phrases or words, put commas between them. Gads, I really am having to write about that again :)
So, if I’m understanding properly, we use commas as separators in our urls because they are the same as forward slashes, and underscore between every other letter in the meta keywords for Google but a rotating space/dash/dot on words over 5 letters long for MSN, and for title tags we.... I’m sick of it too, Danny. Let’s just put out great content and build links and be done with it. Or do we put out great links and build content? With dashes, not spaces, of course.