Hyphen and Underscore for SEO
September 12th, 2007 · by David Bradley
I write a regular column for a major publisher. The system utilizes a fantastic CMS (content management system) but one thing about it that has always bugged me since I was first shown the ins and outs is that image and other filenames have to have underscores rather than hyphens. E.g. file_name.jpg not file-name.jpg. Of course, I always use a descriptive tag with the file_name but that doesn’t help in terms of SEO if the file_name itself is rendered as a single nonsensical entity in Google’s eyes, rather than being separated into two meaningful words and hence a useful keyphrase - file-name - by the hyphen.
Well, I need feel bugged no more. According to a recent talk at Wordpress camp by Google’s Matt Cutts, the Google algorithm now (it didn’t before) treats the _underscore_ as a word separator equivalent to the -hyphen-. This means that all those file_names will be seen as file-names or more explicitly “file names” and so will gain the relevance of that keyphrase, which was previously lost on Google. This is also good news for the Sciencebase site, which has a lot of legacy pages that used underscores in the html page names. Hopefully, these too will gain new ranking for their keywords with the algo update.
In the same talk, Cutts also recommends various optimization techniques for Wordpress bloggers (which apply equally to every website, to be frank):
He recommends using a plugin or hack that swaps the name of the blog title with the name of the individual post title, this has always been the case for Sig Figs.
He says everyone should use Alt attributes while blogging and with photos. This is important not only for SEO but for visitors who do not see a site as well as you or who use a site reader.
Apparently, Google does not care about the number of slashes in a URL (blog/title/date/#), so bloggers needn’t worry about the permalinks and sub-folders unless they’re concerned with Yahoo ranking, apparently Yahoo still does care about slashes.
Another interesting point that emerged is that Google essentially ignores file extensions in a URL in terms of ranking (.php, .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .jsp are all seen as equivalent. But, don’t use .exe, that’s a special case and dangerous for SEO.
One final point, if you are hoping to get your blog into Google News you must have multiple authors, but everyone knows that don’t they?
Just for the record, these tips were first (I believe) reported by Loren Baker here.
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9 responses so far ↓
Hi am a savvy SEO, but didn’t know about this multi authors requirement to get in Google news. Thanks for the tip!
Emmanuel
http://www.getbiz.co.uk
Emmanuel, it’s something that has always been the case, but Matt Cutts recently highlighted the point and those various other SEO tips
db
“One final point, if you are hoping to get your blog into Google News you must have multiple authors, but everyone knows that don’t they?”
This was explained to me (though indirectly) by a news agency that liked what I was tapping out, but didn’t like the fact that should I vanish or go mad, no one would be able to step in and carry the battle forward on my behalf…
Yes, I spoke with the Google press office about this some time ago, that’s definitely part of the reason. Of course, an unscrupulous webmaster or blogger could easily create, ahem, logins for co-writers, and then approach Google News with the requisite author list.
db
Here is some addional information about how to get a site indexed by Google news:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003934.html
Emmanuel
http://www.getbiz.co.uk
Emmanuel, do you think it is worth the effort? My SciScoop.com site was listed in Google news for years, and while it built up quite a following over the years, traffic from Google News was not that high. Subject matter maybe? Timing? Reader perception? Who knows?
db
I think it definitely matters in terms of linking - a lot of websites rely on Google news rss to display news on their site, and you get then links automatically to your site. It is worth checking first how many websites are actually displaying your news, and if the number is not significant, probably change the keywords you are targeting to get more site using your news.
A good test:
1) target a keyword phrase you are currently not ranking for in Google.
2) make sure you use these keywords in a few copies
3) start monitoring the amount of websites including your news
4) refine the keywords if the amount of websites listing your news is low, until you get an acceptable number of sites starting linking to you
5) check your ranking for your keywords
6) the ranking should improve => traffic as well
If think it is a good tactic to be used for your links campaigns.
A lot of site are relying on Google news to display targeted new on their site, and you then get a direct link to your site.
But this has to go through a SEO process:
1) monitor the number of sites using your news, and tune the keywords in your copies to increase this number.
2) monitor the traffic you get to specific news, and see how more links to a targeted news increase traffic
Emmanuel
http://www.getbiz.co.uk
Okay. Thanks for the tips.
db
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