Using "dots" in URLs - what are the Google consequences?

google dots URL consequence

[morags]

I recently read a post here on WebmasterWorld (can't find it now) which hinted at the use of "dots" instead of "hyphens" in URLs, to achieve a similar result in Google - but with a more aesthetically pleasing URL.

The argument was that Google treats both as spaces (and completely ignores the "underscore" character). The logic was sound, and I would like to use dots in URLs on a new site. But although I agree with the logic, I can see no evidence in G that using dots actually works. The only dots I see, in the URLs of ranked pages, are always immediately followed by "html" ;-)

Can anyone confirm whether googlebot actually indexes pages with dots in the URL - or does it just get confused?

Example. I propose to use URL structure similar to www.mysite.com/keyword1.keyword2-keyword3.html instead of using www.mysite.com/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html

Thanks.

[texasville]

I am going to "bump" you back to the top so tedster doesn't miss this. He is the expert on this I believe. I saw that thread. Seems like just last week.
<edit>add info:
Ooops..it was g1smd...and you can take what he says to the bank imho...

The thread you want is: [webmasterworld.com...]

[edited by: tedster at 4:24 am (utc) on May 2, 2006]
[edit reason] make link live [/edit]

[tedster]

I'll back up g1smd on this. Because using periods in file names is not a very common practice, you don't notice it in the SERPs all that much. But folders and files named using periods as a word seperator do show up in the search results -- there's no indexing or ranking problem that I've ever heard of.

I'm still a hyphen kind of guy -- I prefer dedicating the "dot" to it's more common purposes in the domain name and the file extension.

[morags]

Thanks guys. Yes, that was the thread. And it was because I trusted the opinion of the author that I decided to follow his advice.

[g1smd]

There are dots in http://www.keyword.domain.com/ so why would dots in /some.folder/the.file.name.html be treated any differently?

Answer: they aren't.

.

Extra bonus: URL then contains only slash (/) and dot (.) punctuation and becomes much easier to say out loud too. With no dashes (-), there is no confusion between dash (-) and slash (/) any more.