Google: Actually, Dashes Aren’t The Same As Underscores Yet

Aug 10, 2007 at 8:56am ET by Barry Schwartz

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.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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4 COMMENTS ON Google: Actually, Dashes Aren’t The Same As Underscores Yet

Stephan Spencer, August 10th, 2007 at 4:05 pm ET:

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?

rustybrick, August 10th, 2007 at 6:02 pm ET:

So what is going on here?

Danny Sullivan, August 10th, 2007 at 7:19 pm ET:

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.

Mike Nicholson, August 14th, 2007 at 3:16 am ET:

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.

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