Underscore vs dashes, something that is often underestimated when many are trying to find the right domain to get indexed for a keyphrase. Even choosing the appropriate separator could give you the edge on your unknowing opponents, and here is how:
To find out, let’s take a trip in the Google Time Machine. Set the dial for 1999, the year Matt first discovered Google. Matt was using, I dunno, maybe HotBot at that point? The curtain rises:
Matt: Hmm, this search for [FTP_BINARY] didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I got a couple scuzzy looking urls, and the other documents just have the words “FTP” and “BINARY” but the term “FTP_BINARY” doesn’t actually appear. (Note: Matt was a bit of a nerd, as you can tell.)
Some Random Person That I Don’t Remember: Have you tried Google?
Matt: What’s that?
SROTIDR: It’s a search engine written by nerds for nerds! They index numbers! Sometimes they even index punctuation, like “C++”. Try your underscore search there.
Matt: Okay, here goes. Whoa! They actually return pages with the literal string “FTP_BINARY”! That’s wicked cool! (Did I mention Matt was a nerd? Big-time nerd.)
SROTIDR: Yeah. The wild thing is that they wrote a paper about how they crawl the web and rank pages.
Matt: Well, now that’s just silly. I wonder why they didn’t keep it a secret? I bet those papers will make great reading for my information retrieval class.
Google’s strength was in its ability to index numbers and some punctuation (come to think of it, search engines have come a long way in five years). With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing. Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like kw1_kw2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for kw1_kw2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like kw1-kw2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “kw1 kw2″.
That’s why you should always choose dashes instead of underscores. To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url (see Matt Cutts). And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while-consolidating-your-debt-so-
you-can-play- texas-holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for other reasons.
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