Page 2 - Search engine friendly directories for links database

Snakeoil is good for you, right?

I think google interprets dashes ( - ) as spaces or splitters between keywords wheras underscores ( _ ) are not.

Not 100% sure if this has any relavency in the url, but it does in the body text/page title text.

Here is an example:

Keyword: Custom Session Handler
Goog'd link: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...G=Google+Search

Now, see this one:
Keyword: Custom-Session-Handler (with the dashes)
goog's link: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...G=Google+Search

Rankings stay the same. Now this one with underscores:

Keyword: Custom_Session_Handler (with underscores)
goog'd link: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...G=Google+Search

No match for the above as the underscores are seen by google as a continuation of the word and thus see's it as one word and not the three.

How things are split for a search are probably different than how they are split for an index. I need more evidence than a couple google searches to be convinced.

Besides, the underscores/dashes weren't in the page that's indexed, they were in your query. It'd be more telling to see two identical pages, one using underscores and one use dashes in the URL to see which one ranks higher.

Just to throw another wrench in the gears- google for "phone bot", "find ip address perl" and "streaming mp3 ogg server".

I URL-escape the information in these URLs, and the results are very good.

Ok - we can try this. Maybe keep the page as it is now but add 2 more pages with url's as ->

csh/custom-session-handler/
csh/php/custom_session_handler/

It would be intresting to see. Maybe come back to this thread in a couple weeks with the result...

Regular encoded spaces work well ( %20 ) also.

In fact, if you search for pretty much any combination of "perl","ip","address","find", "get" and similar queries my geekuprising page is right at the top of 200,000 + results. Pretty cool.

Ya - the spaces in the url to spell out the keywords. I know someone that swears by that.

It would be cool if a few people could get together and do a little research and come up with a good page algorithm for ranking. Create a spider to spider the given page and return the alg results or ranking wieght based on the parsed page data. Could help out alot of us...

Hero,

Let me clarify a bit more, I didn't want to give the impression that a catid in the URL would not get spidered because obviously it will, the point I was trying to make is as John picked up on.

If you are optimizing a web site for search engines you are always going to want a certain keyword(s) for particular pages. So using the keyword science fiction, everything else being equal, under particular search engines having the keyword in the URL will give you a better position in the search engine.

And we all know that the most clicked results of the search engines are the top 3 positions.

As for the dashes / underscores, please read what I said guys. I did not in anyway suggest that either will affect your ranking or position. I simply said that the underscore will get lost in the search engines, in terms of output when an underscore is displayed in an underlined link it becomes obfuscated and thus if anyone simply types the URL in a seperate window for example the chances are your mod rewrite implementation will not account for the space that is typed and thus result in a 404. So no not snakeoil

As to whether an underscore is better or worse in terms of ranking I do not know which is why I didn't say that, but as to your research requests, I will be able to provide an answer to this hopefully soon.

SaveLua was googled some time ago and all of the URL's used underscores, I asked my SEO buddy to look over the site which is when he advised me to change to a dash instead. I have now done this so when Google nexts spiders the site and adds the links to the engine both will be in their so I will check my keywors list and let you know which of the pages ranks higher, the dash or the underscore version.

Re the whole underscore issue, now I've looked around a bit, I think I'm gonna go with underscores rather than dashes in my URLs. I had a look at all the top directories and they all use underscores - I never saw one that used dashes. I know it's a bit of a lemming mindset - if the top directories jumped off a cliff, I probably would too - but if they can't see a reason not too, neither can I.

Plus the main reason for putting the categories into the URL rather than a cat id (eg - /Science_Fiction/Star_Trek/ versus /cat/23/) are mainly cosmetic (oh yeah and SEO, of course :-) - it's more intuitive for the user. For that reason, I'd lean towards underscores which are more attractive than dashes and certainly better than spaces %20 everywhere.

Good luck with it, I will let you know what my results are when Google gets it's act together.