Underscores Score Big With Google
Many sites have URLs that incorporate underscores. Examples of these could include:
Top level domain:
- www.i_love_google.com
Subpage domain
- www.xyz.com/this_is_an_extreme_example_of_an_underscored_url
Matt Cutts, head of Google's Web Spam Team recently announced at WordCamp 2007 that Google will now treat underscores as word separators. What does this mean to you? It means that in the past those underscored URLs appeared as one long word to Google, so from the examples listed above Google would see www.i_love_google.com not as three words - i, love and google, but as one big word - i_love_google. Since most people do not use underscores in their searching and they don't tend to search for big phrases utilizing underscores, having underscores in your URL did not help you from an SEO perspective. Now all that is changing and with this news I expect to see a lot more underscoring usage in the future.
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