Domain Name Dilemma: Do Dashes or Underscores Goose Google Rankings More?
The debate rages.
Some swear dashes in domain names send rankings soaring.
Some have an ongoing love affair with underscores.
Others are sure there is no difference.
While I agree you do get a bit of a bounce in Google
if you do this right - it’s only marginal.
Still let’s end this debate once and for all and
PROVE which is better. Using Google search results
(SERPS) to test if Google treats dashes or underscores
the same or differently.
The guinea pig multi-word search term I picked is
"affordable search engine placement".
To set a benchmark I first cast the broadest net
possible doing a search using
affordable search engine placement
Google returned this:
Searched the web for affordable search engine placement.
Results 1 - 10 of about 78,600
That says 78,600 pages were indexed by Google for
ANY of those keywords.
Next I searched on the same phrase only this time
I separated the words by dashes like this:
affordable-search-engine-placement
Google turned up these results:
Searched the web for affordable-search-engine-placement.
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,160.
As you can see our term with dashes gave considerably
fewer results than the one without.
Then I searched on the same words separated by
underscores:
affordable_search_engine_placement
For this one Google didn’t find much:
Searched the web for affordable_search_engine_placement.
Results 1 - 4 of about 6.
Finally I searched for
"affordable search engine placement"
Note the quotes. Using quotes limits the search
results to one specific phrase.
In this case Google returned:
Searched the web for "affordable search engine
placement".
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,160.
If that looks familiar it’s exactly the same number
of pages as the keyword phrase with dashes returned.
Okay so what have we got?
The first search returns what you could say is a
free for all of listings with any of the words in
the keyword phrase. That’s why there are so many
search results.
Next the phrase with underscores produced negligible
results. As in next to none.
While the keyword phrase with dashes and the exact
phrase search turned up the same number of SERPs.
At this point you should be wondering "Why is that?"
Glad you asked. Even if you didn’t let me explain.
The reason for this apparent match of search results
is Google uses the dash to separate the words in the
phrase. Programmers call this a "delimiter". In essence
Google sees the dash as a separator between the words.
Yet Google obviously does NOT treat the underscore as
a delimiter. To Google it’s just another character.
Which is proven by the search results. Since if
Google treated the dash and underscore alike the
number of SERPs returned for
affordable_search_engine_placement
or
affordable-search-engine-placement
would be identical. But as you saw they are not.
Not even close.
So the answer as to which is better, dashes or
underscores, is obvious now isn’t it? You want to
use dashes in your domain names, folder names,
files names etc.
That’s because using dashes to separate the words
will give you the biggest Google impact - whatever
that impact may be. Since Google can parse the
different words. While underscores don’t help
one iota.
Look. This isn’t theory or speculation. It’s fact.
And you can repeat the same searches with any
keyword phrase you want and you’ll get the same
results.
Yet to keep this real don’t expect some kind of
massive boost from this dash trick. Sure it can
help a tad as part of an over all optimization
scheme. But whether or not you use dashes in a
domain, folder or file name is not going to be
what gets you top Google listings. Content and
links are.
Still this study does settle the debate about dashes
and underscores. Giving you yet another little
thing you can do to rank well.
About the author:
John Gergye shares more ideas like this in his just
updated eBook "Traffic From Google in 35 Days".
Find out more
here: http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/j/tfg35cl.shtml
Or test your search engine IQ by taking his seo quiz
http://www.traffic-test-tube.com/search-engine-quiz.shtml
and get the free special report "Coming Out On Top".
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