It's one of the longest-running SEO questions around, and still something many of us get asked by clients, readers, conference attendees and so forth: Should we use dashes or underscores in our URLs? Google re-opened the discussion recently with a new YouTube video that highlights how Google currently handles dashes and underscores, and also reminds us that Google and Bing differ on this bit of SEO minutiae. Many of you will recall this was a pretty hot topic a few years ago when Google originally announced that both dashes and underscores both served as separators, and then backtrac [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Microsoft: Bing SEO | SEO: Domain Names & URLs

ICANN - the organization in charge of internet domain names - has approved plans that may create hundreds or thousands of new "top level domain names." I've seen some reports already that this will help with search engine optimization. It won't. It'll just enrich some new TLD owners at the expense of brands who will now spend even more to fight cybersquatting. The New Domain Names Are Coming ICANN is the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names And Numbers, and it oversees the world's domain name system. In its wisdom, it decided yesterday that the 22 generic top level domain (gTLD) names  w [...]

Related Topics: SEO: Domain Names & URLs | Top News

The Twitter Blog announced they are now testing expanding their Twitter based URL shortening service, t.co on URLs that are long. The main difference here is that they will show a portion of the real URL, but pass it through t.co for security reasons. Twitter explained: When this is rolled out more broadly to users this summer, all links shared on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with a t.co URL. A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could [...]

Related Topics: SEO: Domain Names & URLs | Twitter

Many site owners have wanted the recently introduced canonical tag to work across domains. Now their wishes will come true. Google announced cross-domain support will come by the end of the year. The news came out during the Duplicate Content: The Search Engines Edition session at SMX East conference today. Google made the announcement in response to site owners again voicing that they wanted such a solution. The existing canonical tag is only supported by Google, at the moment. Yahoo and Bing both said they're studying support but think its likely they'll add support by the end of the y [...]

Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Domain Names & URLs | SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps | Top News

Over at Search Engine Roundtable today, Barry Schwartz writes about the latest comments from Google about domain registration and its impact on SEO/search rankings. In this case, it's Google employee John Mueller suggesting in a Google Webmaster Help forum thread that Google doesn't look at the length of a domain registration: A bunch of TLDs do not publish expiration dates -- how could we compare domains with expiration dates to domains without that information? It seems that would be pretty hard, and likely not worth the trouble. Even when we do have that data, what would it tell us when co [...]

Related Topics: Features: Analysis | Google: SEO | SEO: Domain Names & URLs | Top News