Google Seeing Underscores As Spaces Now

[AussieWebmaster]

Matt Cutts announced that Google now sees underscores as spaces at WordCamp 2007 over the weekend.

That helps all those people using CMS programs that default with the underscore.... anyone see a lift because of this?

[beu]

I've not seen any lift as of yet. Either way, GREAT find and thanks for the update Aussie!

[khalidh]

Finally, I am sure that took quite a bit of effort to implement. I wonder when they started that. I had noticed that some of the Google pages at conversion university used under scores long time ago.

Khalid

[ciaran]

It's obviously good news for all those who have been using underscores; I'll probably continue to recommend hyphens for aesthetic reasons - I find that they're more readable when displayed in emails, in print, etc... (ie in non-search marketing material).

Anyone else anal enough to have an aesthetic preference?!

[AussieWebmaster]

Originally Posted by ciaran

It's obviously good news for all those who have been using underscores; I'll probably continue to recommend hyphens for aesthetic reasons - I find that they're more readable when displayed in emails, in print, etc... (ie in non-search marketing material).

Anyone else anal enough to have an aesthetic preference?!

yeah I had our programmers write a script to change the underscores to dashes for our java cms!

[ciaran]

Good work!

[khalidh]

Originally Posted by AussieWebmaster

yeah I had our programmers write a script to change the underscores to dashes for our java cms!

ohhhh, java files with underscores or dashes...no die hard java programmers there?

The problem is that each programming language has its own standard of how a page should be named. Java apps for example do not use underscores or dashes in naming a file. Instead, we capitalize each new word. So,
no "first-page" or "first_page", instead we name "firstPage"

I do not know why Google did not acknowledge these standards exist in the first place and just code to understand them.

Khalid