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Hyphen and Underscore for SEO Redux

October 20th, 2008 by David Bradley >> 17 Comments

This is an important update to a post that appeared on September 12, 2007.

It seems that Google still doesn’t like underscores, as the big G’s spam czar Matt Cutts said in a post on his blog:

People thought that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.

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.

What would be ideal would be if Matt were to tell us that the Google algorithm now treats the _underscore_ as a word separator equivalent to the -hyphen-, but unfortunately, it seems, it does not. This means that all those file_names will be seen as file-names or more explicitly “file names” and will not gain the relevance of that keyphrase, which is still lost on Google. This is bad news for the Sciencebase site, which has a lot of legacy pages that used underscores in the html page names.

Nevertheless, in that same talk, Matt recommended various optimization techniques for WordPress bloggers (which apply equally to every website, to be frank):

He recommended 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 Sciencetext.

He said everyone should use the “Alt” attribute while blogging and with photos. This is important not only for SEO but for vision-compromised readers.

Interestingly, 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.


Leave a comment ↓

  • Emmanuel // Sep 14, 2007 at 8:04 am

    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

  • David Bradley // Sep 14, 2007 at 11:04 am

    Emmanuel, it’s something that has always been the case, but Matt Cutts recently highlighted the point and those various other SEO tips

    db

  • Wayne Smallman // Sep 19, 2007 at 6:58 am

    “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…

  • David Bradley // Sep 19, 2007 at 7:13 am

    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

  • Emmanuel // Sep 19, 2007 at 8:04 am

    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

  • David Bradley // Sep 19, 2007 at 8:40 am

    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

  • Emmanuel // Sep 19, 2007 at 8:58 am

    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

  • Emmanuel // Sep 19, 2007 at 9:36 am

    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

  • David Bradley // Sep 19, 2007 at 10:57 am

    Okay. Thanks for the tips.

    db

  • Mohit // Oct 19, 2008 at 11:44 pm

    I agree with your article, but would you like to also provide some updated information as it’s been a year now.

  • Taylor Thompson // Oct 20, 2008 at 11:28 pm

    Thanks for the information man I had no idea. Speaking of Matt Cutts, does everyone seriously know who that guy is? And shouldn’t he have a little bit higher of a page rank than 6? Just a thought. I would think so. Anyway, thanks for the info man. I’ll be back for more for sure!

  • David Bradley // Oct 21, 2008 at 7:37 am

    Thanks for dropping by Taylor, glad you find the updated post useful. I think there may be others in the Sciencetext archive that could do with a refresh, so if you spot any do let me know.

    As to Matt Cutts, he’s a Google employee, apparently, charged with eradicating spam from their index, I guess they don’t want to show favoritism by giving him a higher page rank, but yes, you’d think he’d be ranking higher than a PR6 given his prominence in the blogging about blogging and webmaster spheres.

  • Margaret Jean // Nov 3, 2008 at 6:43 pm

    I have separately optimized different pages within my site for different keywords under a common global theme with quite good results. Different pages rank pretty well for those keywords.
    I have noticed though that when i use hyphens in the page names instead of underscores results are not so good, and it takes longer for google to rank them for that keyword.

  • David Bradley // Nov 3, 2008 at 7:31 pm

    Margaret, that’s very peculiar as Google still sees underscores as noise and assumes an underscore phrase is one word.

  • Margaret // Nov 3, 2008 at 9:55 pm

    David, i am constantly updating my site and adding new pages as the need arises. I have been using hyphens and will keep monitoring the results.
    Thanks for your quote and congrats on your articles, to which, by the way, i came through a google search.

  • pondicherry times // Feb 4, 2010 at 3:06 pm

    and yes why cant you image the digg, its full of underscore, but it give best result and show in 1st page of google itself

  • David Bradley // Feb 5, 2010 at 8:20 am

    @Pondicherry “image the digg”? What does that mean? Yes, the website Digg uses underscores…what’s your point?