commas in urls - any advantages?

[HuskyPup]

I was checking some of my keywords today and a top 3 result was formatted so:

example.com/dir/Keyword1,Keyword2,123.html

In fact this entire directory was formatted with commas.

I have never seen this done before and wondered who had taught them to do so?

Obviously there's nothing much wrong since they rank well for many terms...it just looked so weird to my eyes!

[g1smd]

Hyphens, dots, commas, colons, and the plus sign (at least), are all valid as separators.

You can use any of those, but do avoid spaces and underscores.

[potentialgeek]

It does look weird; it's just somebody's bad habit. I doubt it was ever taught. It's probably just a random choice of separator. I've only seen a few major sites use commas ever; the only reason I can think of why they still use them is for consistency.

p/g

[travelin cat]

The forum software in our CMS uses commas. It doesn't seem to affect any rankings.

[Bewenched]

g1smd
Why avoid underscores?

Many people use these for readability.. I even use underscores for basic file names on my own pc.

[jdMorgan]

Usability.

Call up a friend, and read them this link: test.example.com/space_or underscore.html [test.example.com]

Underscores can 'hide' beneath the link underline, and look like spaces.

Jim

[tedster]

Why avoid underscores?

Underscores are also not taken unambiguously as a "separator" character, even by today's search algos. They cannot be, because they are also part of many technical names that are searched for.

Want to see the difference in action? Do a google search for "_" and you get 454 million results. Do a search for "-" or "," or "+" and you see zero results.

[g1smd]

Underscores are treated as being a part of the word itself, not as a separator. Underscores are used in function names when programming, so it makes it easy to search for code snippets because Google needs you to include the underscore in the keyword when making that type of search.

Do a search for

[_add]

and for

[add_]

for example to find functions for adding up, and note that there's no results for Attention Deficit Disorder in there. Note that those two results are completely different to each other. See that the results for

[add]

are completely different again.

The only time I use underscores in filenames is when they are for installers and other temporary files - files that the user would remove immediately after setting up the functions on their website. In this case, the filename begins with an underscore which makes it appear at the very top of the list in the FTP or SSH window.

_install.php
_README.TXT
_upgrade.php
afile.php
otherfile.php
somefile.php
thatfile.php
thisfile.php

The instructions would say: Once installed, remove all filenames with an underscore from the server.