Now All Engines Treat Underscores as Word Separators

[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.