Search Marketing Blog


Underscore Now Recognized As Word Separator By Google

Last Saturday (07.21), Matt Cutts announced at the Wordpress Wordcamp that Google now recognizes underscores (_) in URLs as valid word separators. Previously, Google only recognized hyphens (-) as a word separator. So feel free to use either word separator in your search engine friendly URLs.


In addition, Matt made the following recommendations:

  1. Use the the SEO Title Plugin to add post titles to your title tags.
  2. Using standard file extensions does not affect rankings (i.e .html, .php, apsx).
  3. The number of slashes in your URL does not impact search rankings in Google.

For more information visit News.com’s post on Matt’s presentation.

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3 Responses to “Underscore Now Recognized As Word Separator By Google”

  • Eric Myers 07.25.2007 at 2:23 pm

    That’s great news on the underscore — it goes to prove that Google seems to pay attention to the market and respond accordingly!

    Very interested on knowing more about the SEO Title Plug In…… any recommended links?

    Thanks as always Kent — keep the good stuff coming!

  • Kent Schnepp 07.25.2007 at 2:28 pm

    Eric -

    Check out Stephan Spencer’s Wordpress SEO Title Tag Plugin.

  • Top 5 EngineWorks Search Engine Marketing Blog Posts Of 2007 - EngineWorks 12.27.2007 at 5:07 pm

    [...] Underscore Now Recognized As Word Separator By Google - Google’s head of Web spam, Matt Cutts, mentions a little something about underscores, which [...]


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