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Domain Name Dilemma: Do Dashes or Underscores Goose Google Rankings More?
By:
John Gergye - [web]
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:
affordablesearchengineplacement
For this one Google didn't find much:
Searched the web for affordablesearchengineplacement.
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 should. 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
affordablesearchengineplacement
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.
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.
>>Reprint/Distribution Source : ArticleWareHouse.com
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