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That's fine by me. It makes sense that if a page pays more attention to the space separated version than the hyphenated that it should rank higher for that term.
That doesn't appear to be the case though (at least for me).
For the hyphenated version, which my page is optimised for, I rank below sites using the space separated version and also a version with no delimiter at all, i.e 'keyword'.
For the space separated version I jump to the top of the SERPs even though the term doesn't feature anywhere on my page copy, title or METAs.
I have zero incoming links that refer to either of these terms and so I'm left wondering:
How does Google treat hyphens in the Title tag, META tag, and page copy?
Many, many thanks to all who post on WW. It's been an incredible resource so far.
My experience is that google treats hyphenated words as two separate words. I may be wrong of course so anyone else feel free to correct me.
liam
welcome to Webmaster World.
I can confirm what liamgt said: hyphenated words are treated like separate words.
You might use search for hyphenated words ...there have been a lot of threads around that.
And thanks for the suggested search term - I'd done various searches but none that turned up that much info.
I'm still not clear though. I understand the relevance of hyphens in file names and urls but not title/meta/copy.
I'll continue to ponder this one and for reference this is what I'll be trying to figure:
If Google is seeing my hyphenated term as two words, how come a search using hyphens returns a different number of results to no hyphens?
If Google is seeing my hyphenated term as two words would I be better off losing the hyphens on my page?
If I lost the hyphens on my page would I still get results for the hyphenated term?
Most of this is theoretical, I'm happy with my rankings so it's unlikely I'll change anything - I'm just curious as to how Google works for future reference.
Also, I just realised this thread would probably have been better placed in the marketing/keyword forum. Sorry about that.
that's interesting. I made a few tests with searches for key phrases targetted by some of my sites. I found always a lot more results for keyword1 keyword2 than for keyword1-keyword2. In both cases my pages rank #1 - so I didn't notice the apparent difference in results. I must have been blind ;(
I use the (more common) kw1 kw2 version in title, meta keywords, h tags, internal links and content. Kw1-kw2 is not used at my pages. In URL I use */kw1_kw2.htm. (Goal: to be found also for kw1 alone, or kw1 kw3 aso.)
My assumptions:
1. kw1 kw2 brings up pages containing those keywords regardless to their position (there can be other text between those keywords, they might be other way round like kw2 kw1 ...).
2. kw1-kw2 brings up only pages with those keywords found together.
It would be some work to testify this.
I'll do some testing by adding new content pages using the none-hyphen variants and see what happens.
Cheers - Stretch
kw1-kw2: only results with kws in that order, and found together.
kw2-kw1: that order.
kw1 kw2: any order, and also kws not together.
kw1_kw2: results with exactly that term.
this is quite normal with SEs. Most input analyzers turn a search for hyphenated input into a phrase search.
Thus the serps will usually return all occurences of the correct sequence, with or without hyphens.
The underscore on the other hand, is not a token separator but is rather looked upon as a normal letter. (Sometimes used by applications as a placeholder for such.)
I won't think that any syntactical difference is made here between words in titles or in meta tags as opposed to the full-text.
Kosta
and why I get different results for
"keyword1 keyword2"
compared to
keyword1-keyword2?
Example:
"content management" = 1,890,000
content-management = 358,000
High-lighting routines (emphasing your search terms in the serps) often differ from actual algorithms used on retrieval. That's why at first I thought that there must be at least one 'content-management' in every hit that was returned on that search. But it doesn't seem to be the reason here.
To further lighten up, it would take some analyzing of the returns included in the search for "content management", yet not in the one for 'content-management'. As said, I couldn't find the hyphenated phrase in most of the ones I tried.
This could be caused by an algorithm-flaw in the main result merger, as well as it can be the result of merging indexes of differing provenience. (That were constructed / build by different algorithms.)
Kosta
