How Google interprets underscores and dashes in a URL for Search Engine Optimization
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How Google interprets underscores and dashes in a URL for Search Engine Optimization
| MATT CUTTS: Hi, everybody. |
| I wanted to give you an update on underscores |
| versus dashes in URLs. |
| This is something that a lot of people have asked me about. |
| And I had talked about it a long time ago. |
| And so I figured it was time for an update. |
| So first, let me give a little bit of history about why, |
| whenever we see an underscore, we join that in the URL rather |
| than separate using that. |
| So what I mean? |
| Well, if you say red dash widget in a URL, we view that |
| dash as a separator. |
| So we index the word red, and we index the word widget. |
| And those are separate. |
| Whereas if you were to have War of 1812 with underscores-- |
| so, war of 1812-- |
| instead of separating on the underscores we actually glom |
| all those together. |
| So that's one term that you could find by searching for |
| war underscore of underscore 1812. |
| Seems kind of weird. |
| So why does Google do it that way? |
| Well, whenever we started, AltaVista was huge. |
| We were just this little tiny company. |
| And we were all very techie. |
| Lots of computer programmers. |
| And we wanted to find exactly what we wanted as far as |
| terms. We really cared about precision. |
| And so whenever you are a programmer, you often have |
| things like, if you're a C programmer, you might |
| recognize TMP underscore MAX. |
| And so, if you are a programmer, you want to be |
| able to search for that term and find TMP underscore MAX-- |
| and that exact term. |
| Not just TMP and MAX that happen to be on the page. |
| So it was because the original engineers were programmers, |
| and the programmers wanted to be able to search for |
| programming terms, that we joined based on the underscore |
| rather than having that act as a separator. |
| Now in practical terms, it doesn't make that much of a |
| difference. |
| It's kind of what we call a second order effect. |
| It's not a primary thing that really makes a huge |
| difference. |
| For example, Wikipedia has a lot of pages that say war |
| underscore of underscore 1812. |
| That doesn't keep Wikipedia from ranking. |
| Because there's page rank, there's |
| proximity, there's title. |
| There's all the other signals that we use, over 200 of them. |
| But if you are going to make a site and |
| you're starting fresh-- |
| so you've got a blank slate to work with-- |
| I would probably go ahead and go with dashes. |
| And I would continue to go with dashes at least for the |
| foreseeable future. |
| We had thought about doing a little project to split on |
| underscores a few years ago. |
| But it turns out the amount of impact it has in our rankings |
| is relatively low. |
| And it turns out, to get engineers to do that versus |
| some other projects-- |
| there were other higher impact projects that we could have |
| them work on. |
| So at least for the time being, we still join on the |
| underscore and separate on the dash. |
| So a few people had asked, you were thinking about splitting |
| on the underscore, do you do that yet? |
| The answer is no. |
| I don't know when we will. |
| Nobody is slated to be working on that. |
| So at least for the time being, it's better to stick |
| with a dash. |
| Now if you already have a website, if it already uses |
| underscores, and if it already works the way you want, don't |
| go back and rewrite every single URL. |
| I would only bother when it's a brand new website, when |
| you're really working on something fresh. |
| When you're trying to say to yourself, OK, I can do this |
| anyway I want, then that's a pretty good |
| time to go for dashes. |
| If you've already made the choice and you happen to use |
| underscores, I really wouldn't worry about it that much. |
| It's not a huge factor. |
| But I just wanted to explain a little bit about the kinds of |
| reasons why we would do that in the first place and just |
| give a little bit of context and a little bit of update. |
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