seo friendly much replace space with?

[webdevils]

seo friendly(google like) much mod rewrite replace space with dash or dot or underscore? [ex. http://www.xx.com/i-love-you or http://www.xx.com/i.love.you or http://www.xx.com/i_love_you]

 

[Matt Cutts]

Always use the dash or nothing at all. Google can read both and parse them very well. But, it does not handle underscores the same way.

 

[sidddd]

If you see wordpress.. all the blogs (90%) has "-" dash thingy in the permalink structure.. it works fine

 

[steveJD]

Actually i have been wondering about this for sometime myself. I have initially set up my page names without spaces or dash. Should I re-structure these pages and directoried with a dash instead... 3,000 pages to re-index tho


currently my filename would be:

www.xx.com/thedirectoryname/thefilename

should i restructure to:

www.xx.com/the-directory-name/the-filename

or does this not matter too much?

Thanks for your response in advance!

 

[sidddd]

doesnt matter much.. instead make a new site though..

 

[steveJD]

Thanks Sidddd,

For the effort to change this and the small amount of reward I would be better putting effort into a new venture.

You are of course correct - too easy to get caught up on the small details!

 

[snowm]

"-" or "_" is irrelevant nowadays, the google guys say that it's ok to use both. As a matter of fact i've seen "." and "+", i guess what matters is uniformity, if you choose one stick to it.

 

[yeti_racer]

"-" or "_" is irrelevant nowadays, the google guys say that it's ok to use both. As a matter of fact i've seen "." and "+", i guess what matters is uniformity, if you choose one stick to it.

It's always been cool to use both. The trouble is that "red-wagon" is 2 keywords (red & wagon) while "red_wagon" is picked up as only 1 (red_wagon). I say that if you currently have pages indexed (especially if it's lots) then don't change it. But, start using the new method for any new pages or posts.

If you want to change all the old ones, there are a few plugins (Redirection is one of the best for Wordpress) that will do all your 301 redirects automagically. This way, you can move to new SEO friendly titles/page names and not lose your rankings or indexed pages.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

 

[snowm]

It's always been cool to use both. The trouble is that "red-wagon" is 2 keywords (red & wagon) while "red_wagon" is picked up as only 1 (red_wagon).

"Stephan Spencer, from CNET's News Blog, posted an informative entry about changes that are taking place with Google's search engine. Of particular interest was the news from Matt Cutts regarding underscores in URLs. Traditionally, underscores were treated differently from hyphens.

Hyphens have long been the preferred method for dividing keywords up in a link. Whereas, URLs with keywords separated by underscores have been ignored by Google � they would only view it as a phrase. However, according to Stephan, that's no longer the case. Matt Cutts stated that keywords separated with underscores are now treated the same as keywords separated with hyphens."

Now this Matt Cutts dude works for Google so that's why i give some credibility that "-" or "_" nowadays are the same, but as you said some time ago the "_" between keywords was in fact viewed by g00gle as a singe word/phrase.

 

[yeti_racer]

"Stephan Spencer, from CNET's News Blog, posted an informative entry about changes that are taking place with Google's search engine. Of particular interest was the news from Matt Cutts regarding underscores in URLs. Traditionally, underscores were treated differently from hyphens.

Hyphens have long been the preferred method for dividing keywords up in a link. Whereas, URLs with keywords separated by underscores have been ignored by Google � they would only view it as a phrase. However, according to Stephan, that's no longer the case. Matt Cutts stated that keywords separated with underscores are now treated the same as keywords separated with hyphens."

Now this Matt Cutts dude works for Google so that's why i give some credibility that "-" or "_" nowadays are the same, but as you said some time ago the "_" between keywords was in fact viewed by g00gle as a singe word/phrase.

That's cool, I actually hadn't seen that post. Would you happen to have a link?

 

[snowm]

This stuff is already from July 07, Here:

hxxp://news.cnet.com/8301-13530_3-9748779-28.html?tag=mncol;title