Now All Engines Treat Underscores as Word Separators

[Halfdeck]

Barry Schwartz, an SEO news guy, recently contacted all major engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask) and confirmed that now they all treat _ as word separators, similar to how - (dashes) are treated.

So, assuming we're being told the truth and all other factors being equal:

fucked_her_in_the_ass.html

will rank as well as

fucked-her-in-the-ass.html

Before, Google treated _ as a character, to be useful in searches like $_HTTP, $_REQUEST, $_SERVER, etc.

Personally, I still like dashes better than underscores.

[virgohippy]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

Personally, I still like dashes better than underscores.

They're easier to type - no shift key.

[Greenguy]

But, how will fuck-her_in-the_ass.html rank?

[LowryBigwood]

Originally Posted by Greenie

But, how will fuck-her_in-the_ass.html rank?

Interesting, give it a shot... keep us updated.

[virgohippy]

C'mon people, let's give Greenie some PR, ABC, Blogroll, CPR, ADD, ED, Viagra hardlink trades!

[oldbrad]

Good for me i guess. I always use underscores and have for a while, without realizing they were viewed differently.

Brad

[Simon]

This makes me wonder how the SERPs will be affected considering the millions of pages which use underscores instead of hyphens, I mean the page that are already spidered and indexed. Will those pages now start ranking for the individual words? Seems that we'll be seeing a huge change in search results if that's the case.

[LowryBigwood]

Originally Posted by Simon

This makes me wonder how the SERPs will be affected considering the millions of pages which use underscores instead of hyphens, I mean the page that are already spidered and indexed. Will those pages now start ranking for the individual words? Seems that we'll be seeing a huge change in search results if that's the case.

This is just my opinion and is a guess. I would imagine that by the time we get wind of the change, it has already been implemented. I wouldn't expect to see any changes because of that now. Could be wrong though.

[Halfdeck]

Seems that we'll be seeing a huge change in search results if that's the case.

Keywords in urls don't really impact ranking all that much, especially for high traffic queries, where high level of competition marginalizes on-page factors. So for terms like "free porn", this change would have no effect, though you might see slight movement for terms like "mary had a little lamb for dinner last night."

Though all long tails combined is a bigger percentage of Google's overall traffic than head queries, most webmasters don't track their long tail SERP positions, so I think Google expects any changes would go unnoticed.

[eman]

Logic would seem to dictate that pages titled (say) dildo_sex will now score equally alongside dildo-sex.

Gossamer threads users will be pleased.

[Halfdeck]

Call me lazy for trusting what I read:

Matt Cutts:

If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says 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.

[ronnie]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

Call me lazy for trusting what I read:

Matt Cutts:

Or they just like fucking with people.

[Halfdeck]

Or they just like fucking with people.

Nah, it was an honest mistake.

Barry told me he got his info from news.com, which he believed was a reliable source. He said he also emailed Matt Cutts about it, but I guess Matt took his time replying to that email.