Dashes are better than Underscores ...

... between keywords in file names.

[skyhawk133]

In a guest post by Vanessa Fox on Matt Cutt's blog, Vanessa points out dashes are much better than underscores. Matt later bolds this line in the blog entry for emphasis.

I had not thought about this, but apparently blue_widgets.html is considered 1 word, where as blue-widgets.html is considered 2 words. So for multi-word titles used as static HTML names, it looks like using a hyphen is far better than using an underscore. A brief look at the SERPS does confirm this.

[jdMorgan]

> ...the bolding on the SERPs page is a character matching routine, added as a final layer at page creation time to help users see their keywords in the results. But the fact that a character string is bold is not tied to the scoring algorithm itself.

I agree completely.

Jim

[WW_Watcher]

I just do not understand the logic of treating them differently. A dash is a seperator, and an underscore is a seperator, and IMHO, they should be treated the same.

Back to watching
WW_Watcher

[tedster]

It may not be logical (except to programmers) but it is baked into the Google code way down deep. Ignore at your own risk.

There are also some purely user friendly reasons I don't use underbars in page names. For instance, if the link is underlined, the underbar character can be hard to notice. Also it can be nearly impossible to communicate over the phone. I like keeping things simple, and "dash" is simple.

Parallel issues can come with the tilde [webmasterworld.com].

[pageoneresults]

And the underscore visually disappears in underlined links.

Case in point, the title of this topic. ;)

In Firefox, the underscore is totally hidden and looks like a space. IE actually provides a bit more of a visual clue that there is an underscore there.

[WW_Watcher]

Hey Tedster,
Don't get me wrong, In the future I will not ignore it, and I will stop using underscores to seperate discriptive names for my files. When creating links in my pages, I do not use the filename, I do not use the underscores, so it was not an issue.

But that does not change my view that it is easier to read a filename with underscores (because it looks more like spaces), and IMHO think the search engines should look at filenames and read them in a fashion that searchers do.

Unfortunately, common sense does not always go along with intelligence.

Back to watching
WW_Watcher

[jdMorgan]

If you read the exerpt from Matt's blog above, the reasoning was clear -- to allow techies like us to search for HTTP_USER_AGENT and not have to sort through millions of results containing "HTTP", "user", and "agent." While this may not be the decision you or I would make (I'd try a quoted search string if the irrelevant results were too numerous), it's the one their techies made.

Jim

[g1smd]

Did I say that I like using URLs with dots in them like www.domain.com/some.folder/the.sub.folder/some.file.html instead?

That also works very well too.

[mattg3]

If I look for Main Page in what I have google.co.uk

I get the default Wikipedia but as second result I get eclipse, which doesn't even have the word Main Page on the page nor in the source nor in the document in the cache.

Next one is MTV claiming to have Main and Page somewhere in the text. After the third redirect I find Main, and page as part of a longer javascript word.

then several other big sites obviously given a hand coded PR, none featuring Main Page

Only on page two I start having pages actually containing the words close together.

Serious hand PR delivery there...

On a search for Main_Page I get the expected list of Wikis.

Pretty clear demonstration of above.

[southernmost]

I've noticed that on my sites, the pages using underscores in the file names haven't ranked as well as I would have expected. Most of the pages use a dash and rank as expected.
Upon searching using mykeyword_mykeyword I find that the page is ranking fine.
Should I change the underscore page names from mykeyword_mykeyword.html to mykeyword-mykeyword.html?
And what about the external links using the underscore version?
Is this where a 301 is used? Or should I just create another page, leave the old page on the server, and change the navigation to point at the new page? (probably not, since it would be duplicate content).

[jdMorgan]

mattg3,

Do a search for "googlebombing" -- that will neatly explain your results. You can get a page ranked highly for "whales," even though it's about albatrosses, simply by using the word "whales" in the link text of a lot of links that point to the albatross page. Those pages you found probably have a lot of links pointing to them with link text like "MTV's Main Page." (This subject is off-topic to the thread at hand, so you might want to start a new one on link text if you have questions).

southernmost,

> Upon searching using mykeyword_mykeyword I find that the page is ranking fine.
Assuming that you are searching for pages whose URLs contain mykeyword_mykeyword, that's no surprise in light of the info posted above.

> Should I change the underscore page names from mykeyword_mykeyword.html to mykeyword-mykeyword.html?
Yes.

> And what about the external links using the underscore version?
Get as amny updated as you can, and...

> Is this where a 301 is used?
Yes. 301-redirect the old URLs to the new.

> Or should I just create another page, leave the old page on the server, and change the navigation to point at the new page? (probably not, since it would be duplicate content).

The old pages will become inaccessible once you 301 their URLs to the new pages, so take them down or leave them -- it won't matter to search engines or visitors.

Jim