All Annotations of [Preview]

saved by7 people, first by- svartling on 2006-07-24, last byandymatic on 2008-08-06

• Chris Said,
• I always thought this was one of the stupidest things Google has done.

• Firstly, if you’re looking for a literal underscore, why not use quotation marks around your search term? Shouldn’t the smart computer nerds know to do this?

  
  

  Furthermore, an underscore has always stood as the replacement for a space in text formats where spaces were not possible. This is because an underscore has no grammatical use, whereas a hyphen does. This convention precedes Google, and the Web in general.

  
  

  For instance, consider the quandry of Catherine Zeta-Jones

  
  

  If you are to use hyphens to represent spaces in her name you would write it Catherine-Zeta-Jones. This is ambiguos as the viewer cannot tell if she hyphenates her last name, or if the hyphens are merely space replacement.

  
  

  If you wrote it Catherine_Zeta-Jones it’d be obvious that her last name is hyphenated.

• This is but one example, there are many other. So by the nature of the grammatical significance of a hyphen it will never be as good of a space substitute as an underscore. Using hyphens was not a stroke of genius on Google’s part, but rather a rare example of shortsightedness that has been encouraging a step backwards in Internet usability.
• Pete from down under Said,
• May 23, 2006
• Would you be likely to get a better result in the serps using a hyphenated URL vs all one word. ie Would hardware-tools.com rate better than hardwaretools.com
  
  To me that is a burning question.
  
  I have often wondered how successful Google is at separating two (or more)

• tomo Said,

  
  
  

  
  October 8, 2006
  @ 6:00 am
  

  
  
  

  http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=27231%20

  
  

  Google itself recommends underscores, so what should we use ?

• WebMaster ToolBox Said,

  
  
  

  
  October 14, 2006
  @ 12:07 pm
  

  
  
  

  Well if Google recommends underscores, use underscores.
  
  http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=27231&query=underscores&topic=&type=
  
  Says to replace spaces with underscores so that you don’t get the %20 in the url

• lawrence Said,

  
  
  

  
  April 5, 2007
  @ 12:24 pm
  

  
  
  

  This is a very interesting topic.
  
  Undersores vs hyphens

  
  

  I did a couple of searches in Google and came across a site named http://www.make-a-website.com. This site rank number 1 for the keywords “how to make a website” from over a billion websites and no 2 for ” how to create a website” from over 600 million website.

  
  

  This tells me that hyphens does not matter.

  
  

  I’m busy experimenting with a website that I have registered called http://www.how-2-make-website.com. I’m in a tough group, but I want to see how far my hyphenated website is going to rank.

  
  

  I will give some feedback as I go along.

• lawrence Said,

  
  
  

  
  April 6, 2007
  @ 9:25 am
  

  
  
  

  Sorry guys, I made a mistake in the two URL’s that I gave in the previous post.

  
  

  The points must not be after the .com in the URL’s.
  
  Below are the correct URL’s

  
  

  http://www.make-a-website.com
  
  The site that is first from over 1.2 billion websites in Google

  
  

  http://www.how-2-make-a-website.com
  
  My experiment site with dashes

• When writing code the computer will interpret this (FTP_Binary) a one word or phrase but it will interpret this is two words (FTP-Binary). They will NOT be understood the same way by the PC.
• The underscore is read as a connector of the two words making them one word, where as the dash-hyphen is used to separate the words.
• Another example of programmer syntax translating into the real world is words that start with lowercase letters and follow with a uppercase letters, like eBay.

• on 2006-07-24 Svartling
  I often get asked whether I’d recommend dashes or underscores for words in urls. For urls in Google, I would recommend using dashes. Why? To find out, let’s take a trip in the Google Time Machine. Set the dial for 1999, the year Matt first discovered