Which filenames are best for Google

[kippie]

If I want to use more than one word in a file name (for example: cow, horse and goat), what would be the best way for Google to do it:
- cow-horse-goat.html or
- cow_horse_goat.html or
- cow horse goat.html or
- cow%20horse%20goat.html?

[kippie]

Thanks you all for all your reactions.

Is there a limit in the number of characters in a filename for Google?

I mean where shoud I stop with cow-horse-goat-rabbit-pig-chicken-mouse-dog-cat.......html?

Kippie

[g1smd]

Ummm, I read somewhere that something like 52 or 64 characters is the maximum size that some computer systems can handle for the naming of files. It wasn't all that long ago that users were restricted to 8.3 notation.

Don't overcook it. There's no point. Do what is right for the user.

[ams_david]

I havn't seen anyone mention slashes yet. If you have control of how your urls get processed, you can do stuff like:

/blue/widget/2003/buying/guide/

No .html, no .php, no -, no _, just slashes.

[g1smd]

This recent article at evolt covers the subject as well: [evolt.org...]

The article was mentioned only a week or so ago, but that is now hundreds of threads back in the list.

[daisho]

as far as I know your browser doesn't read a long filename as a long file name. It's a URL as a whole. Because of that as long as your server can handle the filename then browsers will do their own caching based on the url and you need not be concerned with 8.3 or other client side file limitations.

daisho.

[micahb37]

As far as Google is concern, it certainly read blue-widget as 'blue' and 'widget'. Just for fun, search for "_" {without the quotes}, you will get millions of results but search for "-"{without the quotes}, nothing, nada, zip result. I think that's proof enough how Google treat hyphen and underscore.

But, if you look at the results, most of the results on a search for "_" are dashed URLs.