Backlinks and Anchor Text

Does the '.' make the difference?

[Andinio]

Scenario

Your website is about widgets and your main target keyword is widgets.
Your website address is www.widgets.net and the name of your business is widgets.net

Other websites link to you with the URL www.widgets.net and the anchor text widgets.net

Question

The question is this, will google aknowledge the anchor text as widgets (sepating it from the '.net' ) or will google see widgets.net as one word?

your comments appreciated

[hetzeld]

Hi Andinio,

The dot is considered as a word separator, as are the hyphen and the underscore.
I'm close to 100% sure as the first word of my subdomain name is nowhere else on my whole site but can definitely be found in Google.

Dan

[Just Guessing]

The underscore doesn't seem to be treated as a word separator these days. See some recent discussion in this thread:
[webmasterworld.com ]

[CuriousWeb]

Yes the underscore is treated as a word for some reason but the hyphen and the dot are treated as word seperators...

[Andinio]

So folks, am i correct to say that if someone links to my site www.widget.net and within the TEXT LINK (ANCHOR) writes the following:

go to widget.net

google will see this text link and award the words:
go, to, widget, net as being relative to my site and NOT the words go, to, widget.net

thanks everyone

PS
Just Guessing
that link about the underscore was fantastic, that wasn't relative to my question but boy is that information important!

Thanks

[edited by: Andinio at 1:28 pm (utc) on Mar. 11, 2003]

[hetzeld]

The underscore doesn't seem to be treated as a word separator these days. See some recent discussion in this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

Just Guessing,

Thanks for bringing that to my attention ;)
I missed that important thread

Dan