Underscores are now word seperators at the big G

July 27th, 2007 by Chris

Matt Cutts apparently made a lot of interesting comments at a WordPress seminar, blogged about here.

He said a lot, but the big news is that Google will soon be treating underscores as word seperators in URLs.

This is long overdue, the underscore was always the traditional word seperator in formats where spaces were not allowed. The reason was it had no grammatical meaning. I liked to give the example of Catherine Zeta-Jones. If you expressed her name in a space-less format using hyphens you’d have Catherine-Zeta-Jones in which case you do not know if she hyphenates her last name or not. In contrast if you use underscores such as Catherine_Zeta-Jones it is obvious she uses a hypen.

However in many programming languages underscores have different functionality and way back when Google engineers decided it was more important to preserve them for those such queries than use them as word seperators. So for a long time people have recommended the use of hyphens as word seperators. Well, now you should be able to use either. Also, for all of those with really old pages made before Google with underscores, good news for us.

Posted in: Search Engine Optimization » by: Chris