Google / Yahoo - Filenames

Do they see keywords in filenames?

[NickCoons]

I have a page on my site, let's call it:

www.domain.com/bluewidgets.php

When I search on Yahoo for "widgets" and my site comes up, it highlights the word "widgets" that it finds on my site, as well as in the URL, so "widgets" in "www.domain.com/bluewidgets.php" is in bold.

Does Yahoo use this in its search for ranking even though it's not seperated by a hyphen or underscore? Google doesn't bold or highlight keywords that it finds in the URL, but I'm assuming that since Google powers Yahoo that however one of them treats the URLs, they both do.

[toddb]

Nick

In my experience Yahoo gives it more pull then google. I do this frequently and get a slightly higher ranking in yahoo then in google on these pages. Also as you mention yahoo will seperate keywordkeyword and show a match. My understanding is google will not seperate.

[NickCoons]

toddb,

<Also as you mention yahoo will seperate keywordkeyword and show a match.>

It looks like they match these words up against a dictionary, because a search for "luwidg" did not include "bluewidgets.php" in the results, but "blue" did result in "bludwidgets.php."

These are not the actual searches I did of course, but I won't post the specifics.

[doc_z]

My experience is:

- Google and Yahoo handle these things in the same way
- a keyword is in the domain name is only considered if it is separated by a hyphen or underscore (the weight for www.keyword.xx is higher than for www.keyword-abc.xx)
- keywords in the document name are only counted if they are exact the keyword (keyword-01.htm does not count)
- directories count if they match the exact keyword, they are neglected if the keyword is only part of the name (keywordabc)

[Brian]

doc: I have to disagree from my experience. As far as I can tell, both Google and Yahoo work the same way, only Yahoo shows you by highlighting the keywords it reads in filenames and domainnames.

In my experience, they will read one word in KEYWORDbanana or both words in KEYWORD-BANANA.

In filenames, I think keywords makes a small difference. In domain names, I think they make a big difference.

Just my experience

[toddb]

I have a 2 pages that were a nice test the one ranks higher in Yahoo and has some sister pages that do the same with www.domain.com/keyword-keyword . Then I just checked another page that ranks number 1 on google and is www.domain.com/abc/. It is number 9 on Yahoo. In my thinking this is proof that Yahoo puts more weight on the serch term or terms in the url even if it is a directory versus the domain. Just to be clear "abc" means I used a short collection of 3 letters that are gibberish to google and yahoo. There must also be other differences of course.

[swerve]

In another thread, I read a very compelling test that shows the following (for Google):

-keywords seperated by underscores in an URL do not count

-concatenated keywords do not count (ie. keyword1keyword2)

The test is to do a Google search in the following format:

allinurl:keyword1 keyword2

I did this for several popular search phrases, and I could not find a single URL containing keywords seperated by an underscore, nor one with concatenated keywords. This suggests to me that Google sees these as a single words, and are thus not counted.

[irubin]

Can you please provide a link to that thread.

Thanks.

Roy

[swerve]

I couldn't find it before, but now I have managed to find it:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Ps. A good specific example (for keyword concatenation) is:

allinurl:web master world