Comments on: Underscores, Dashes, Matt Cutts, Oh My

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:52:41 +0000

Funny. I did notice and I guess you helped to prove my point. I can’t remember if I started off using dashes or if I began using them after learning a little bit of seo and understanding the dashes were needed to recognize the individual words. I have been using them for a long time though.

By: Khalid Hajsaleh

Khalid Hajsaleh — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:47:56 +0000

hehehe, I just noticed that you can not see the underscores in the link I posted to Google! That is the same point you were making in the blog.

I must admit I refused to use dashes for a long time. You can visit http://www.store.motorola.com and thank me for some of the horrible urls there. I came around tho. Using dashes makes the url much more readable.

By: Khalid Hajsaleh

Khalid Hajsaleh — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:01:58 +0000

Oh finally. I am sure it did not take them more than couple of hours to make such a change. I wonder why it took forever to implement. I had noticed a while back that most of the links on Google analytics conversion university were not search engine friendly. Most of them used underscores in naming the files. Checkout this URL from Google

http://www.google.com/analytics/cu/dt_sitemaps_for_seo.html

In the J2EE world, we still use a different convention in naming jsp files. As a java standard, we don’t include underscores or hyphens in the name of a file. Instead, the name of the first variable starts with a small letter, each additional keyword will start with a capitalized letter. So the page will be named: keyword1Keyword2Keyword3.jsp.

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 19:23:40 +0000

I’ve wondered myself. It seems like it would have been such an easy and logical change to implement. Good example too directly from Google. Maybe they discovered no one could find their pages and fixing the underscores was easier than renaming and 301ing all the pages.

It does get hard to keep up with all the different naming conventions. I program in a few languages and have to go back and forth between underscores and capitalization. It’s easy to forget which language gets which convention sometimes.

And when you throw things on the web it adds to the confusion since prior to now it was important to use a dash. As far as I know Google will see the keyword1Keyword2Etc as one word and so not individual keywords are seen. That naming convention works better for the JSP programming, but so not great for the URL.

Even if underscores are now Google friendly I’m still going to stick with dashes. They’ve become my convention in anything that a search engine might crawl and I think they are the most human friendly in terms of readability.