infecto - 5:19 pm on Feb 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

I pretty much have come to the conclusion that dashes and underscores no longer make a difference. Everyone use to always preach that hyphens are the way to go because google does not see them and counts them as a space. Also that if you used say keyword1_keyword2 that the only way it would come up is if you did keyword1_keyword2.

This no longer applies from what I can tell in google or yahoo. Now yes if you use the allinurl: search on google you will not see underscored filenames. But when doing regular searches say using keyword1 and keyword3 I still see google and yahoo finding the file with keyword1_keyword2.

Does this mean hyphens really have no extra bonus anymore? Also are there any search engines that started bumping down pages that used to many hyphens within a file name?

I personally just do not see any real difference in rankings when using underscores or hyphens. Seem to be just a problem of the past.