Matt Cutts of Google informs everyone that reports of Google now treating underscores as word separators is not yet happening.
Matt explains:
I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.
It’s Not Just Google That Treats Underscores Like Dashes that I wrote a few weeks ago, obviously now needs to be updated.
We will keep you informed of any new changes with this, as we hear updates.
Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Domain Names & URLs
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:
Hmm… where am I not 100% correct with my coverage?
So what is going on here?
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.
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.