I don't think I misinterpreted Matt. Decide for yourself. Listen to Matt's talk, jumping to 17 minute mark in the video, and you will hear Matt say the following:

The interesting thing is we used to treat underscores as if they were like word A underscore word B, we would glom that together and we would index that as A underscore B, so if you just searched for the word A, we wouldn't return your post. Ah... We're in the process of changing that. We might have already changed that. So dashes and underscores are almost exactly the same.

Hmm... where am I not 100% correct with my coverage?

Comment by Stephan Spencer | August 10, 2007 4:05 PM

So what is going on here?

Comment by rustybrick | August 10, 2007 6:02 PM

Stephan, here's where you were not 100% correct with your coverage:

"If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk."

That's what Matt wrote, and that's why Barry originally said that Matt (not us, Matt) was saying you weren't correct in the report.

Anyway, I've changed it now to just say "reports" and not name you specifically, since Matt said they were going to change it, might be changing it and that they are almost the same all in the same breath.

Friggin hyphens. I mean lasers.

Comment by Danny Sullivan | August 10, 2007 7:19 PM

I have always been using dashes (just got used to and not because of some ranking benefits or anything of that sort). And i don't think Google's treating dashes and underscores as same will make any ranking differences. Google might be treating them as same now, but i don't think they made much difference earlier also.

Comment by Mike Nicholson | August 14, 2007 3:16 AM