What if every page name starts with (underscore)

[moltar]

This isn't Yahoo specific, but a general SE question. What if I prefix every URL with an underscore. Would SEs care? So the addresses would look something like this:

example.com/_page-name 
example.com/_another-cool-page

If not underscores, then which other printable character would do the trick?

As an alternative I can have a one character folder name. That'd also work. But I don't want the SEs to think that my content is one level deep, even if there is no level 0 per se. For example:

example.com/c/page-name 
example.com/c/another-cool-page

The reason I need this is because the whole site will run under an engine which rewrites all the requests to the root and on. To avoid rewriting, I need some recognizable (regexnizable) pattern to distinguish engine URLs from other URLs.

What do you all think?

[moltar]

Nobody?

[stajer]

well, definitely don't use the /c/ idea - se's will penalize you for the extra layer of depth.

What about something at the end of your url:

example.com/_page-name-99
example.com/_another-cool-page-99

[jrs_66]

Your choice of character is somewhat disturbing.

[topr8]

i do exactly what you are suggesting

eg. i use the underscore as part of a sequence i use to trigger the rewrite rule in the htaccess file

so i have filenames like:
_example
_example-2
_example-3

i have not had a problem with indexing if that's what you are asking.

[jay5r]

Take a look at Matt Cutts comments on using underscores (vs. dashes)...

[mattcutts.com...]

His example is that _MAXINT is different than MAXINT or at least Google treats them differently.

So the upshot is to only use underscores when you really mean underscores.

[moltar]

Interesting... I don't mind dashes, but I think it'd look weird if every page began with a dash :)

example.com/-page-one 
example.com/-page-two 

What about other characters, e.g. "@" or "+"?