Derek Jones - 19 May 2008 06:56 AM

John, you’re still looking at search terms, and going down the same incorrect path.  It’s a leap of logic, or a “what if” scenario that amounts to nothing more than FUD.  Just because Google acts in a certain manner when it perceives that human is searching for an underscore has absolutely no bearing on whether or not it does or doesn’t apply higher or lower rankings to content with - vs. _ in the URLs.

Derek, I think we are talking about two different things.  You are talking about ranking and I am talking about how Google searches text.

However, you can’t rank at all for “Expression Engine” if your entire site uses references to Expression_Engine.”  You could rank (somewhere) for “Expression Engine” if your entire site references Expression-Engine.”  I am not saying you would rank better or worse depending on the term you use, but you have to use the correct term to rank at all.

As you can see from searches, your URL is used for finding search results along with the rest of the content of your site.  So the URL is content.  Some sites (picture, video or Flash heavy for example) can use all the content help they can get.  You might as well use a URL that helps you.  In this case, for Google you should use the dash.

That’s a tremendous leap, John.  And I think we’re both making the same point, though, that if you’re counting on your URL naming scheme for Google rankings, your site is a lost cause.  If there were measurable impact by dash vs. underscore, people who make the change would jump in their rankings, and that frankly doesn’t occur.  Just like the days of yore with meta keywords, there aren’t any one trick ponies in SEO to make you suddenly relevant.

I am not talking about rankings at all, I am talking about content.  I don’t know about ranking.  All I know about is what I can test right now with search.

Though content and rankings are related in the sense that you can’t rank for keywords that are not on your site.  If you have a blank site, you can’t rank for much.  But you can rank for your URL.  In other words, even a blank site can come up with a search for the exact URL.  That means the URL could be considered searchable content.  Maybe it has little impact, or maybe in extreme cases it is the only content searchable on your site (blank site.)

When I refer to rank I am talking about nothing more than simply showing up in search results.  I am not referring to showing up high on the list.  Ranking means you could rank as the last result on the last page of the search results, but you still rank.

I never said that using dashes will INCREASE your rank.  I am just saying that using foo-bar will get you in the index for foo, bar, foo-bar, foo/bar, foo+bar and many other combo’s but foo_bar will only get you indexed for foo_bar.

I am just saying that using foo-bar will get you in the index for foo, bar, foo-bar, foo/bar, foo+bar and many other combo’s but foo_bar will only get you indexed for foo_bar.

I’m a little confused by this…when I search in Google, I assume that the bold words are words that match my search. So if I search for ‘veerle form’, I get a number one result back which looks like:

veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/styling_forms_in_css/

Does that not indicate that it has indexed for form, which means that ‘styling_forms_in_css’ works just as well as ‘styling-forms-in-css’ would have?

Yes, Andy, you are correct, which was my point in my original response to this thread, as was Nevin’s.  John is taking a healthy dose of something, and I would like one, please.

I really tend to think that the character separator is a throw away, maybe google does too?
My mention of camelCaps is probably better just for code like css classes, id’s and the like. Dashes or underscores would be preferrable to that for page names.