Newest SEO advice

[wjcampbe]

A quote from Matt Cutts (Google) blog today
And speaking of putting a dash in URLs, hyphens are often better than underscores [Ed. Note: bolded by Matt ]. african-elephants.html is seen as two words: “African” and “elephants”. african_elephants is seen as one word: african_elephant. It’s doubtful many people will be searching for that.

Worth bearing in mind when you add new pages. If you decide to rush out and rename your pages - do a few at a time and make sure you create a redirect from the old name to the new for each change.

[jont]

Cheers Bill ... looks like a long process ahead of removing the underscores :eek:

[Duncan Rounding]

A quote from Matt Cutts (Google) blog today


Worth bearing in mind when you add new pages. If you decide to rush out and rename your pages - do a few at a time and make sure you create a redirect from the old name to the new for each change.

I've just given this a go with some of my pages and (not that I doubted) but this is absolutely correct. Searching for page name words separated by '_' does not show iin Google but when searching for the whole page name it does. Some work ahead me thinks.

Thanks Bill.

[hobuk]

Its just how i feel when it comes to the big G

[Jan]

Why do a few at a time Bill?

Regards,

[wjcampbe]

Why do a few at a time Bill?

Regards,
Mostly because the prospect of renaming say 300 pages and creating 300 redirects might be enough to make the already harassed Actinicer reach for the kitchen knife drawer...

Also because it is easy to make mistakes in the redirects when doing too many at one time, and that results in 404 errors and lost visitors.

And finally - the SE all see a site that has frequent small changes as a good site to visit regularly. We all want our sites spidered daily, and the other spiders will also see these changes happening and hopefully step up their visit frequency.

No guarantees this will happen, but may as well try to take the most advantage from a forced change :)

[Jan]

:-) Thanks Bill.

It might be relatively easy to make the redirect file from a google sitemap feed and the easiest way to make the changes to the section filenames will be to edit the catalog_section table in the database and use the text replace feature on the page title field to change the underscores into dashes. Which is why I was thinking of doing them all in one go. I don't have many pages mind you, not even if you add them all up from both sites.

Regards,

[buspassjohn]

Don't panic, if you have the phrase in your text (and you should!) then The big G will pick up on the seperate words, not the one.
Tried it by searching for our Dont break the bottle, page name dont_break_the_bottle.html, seems to be picked up ok with parts of name or full phrase.

[Mark H]

So - what we're saying is that in most situations where the page name is:

www.mydomain.com/acatalog/blue_widget.html

and "blue widget" appears in the text, title etc, then Google will still find the page on a search for "blue widget", but if the page name was changed to:

www.mydomain.com/acatalog/blue-widget.html

it might appear higher up the results??

[wjcampbe]

Well, yes - except in true SEO style, you would probably say it might appear higher up the results??

[Duncan Rounding]

It wasn't put quite put like that. It was said that Google will 'read' URLs separated by dashes as separate words but when separated by underscores it will recognise the URL as one continuous word. I have proven this to be true. BUT it did not specifically say that you would rank higher as a result.

[Mark H]

But presumably a few folk think it would improve ranking or else they wouldn't bother changing page names? In the same vein it might also be worth changing

blue_widget.jpg to blue-widget.jpg ??

[Duncan Rounding]

It shouldn't do any harm and it might help. I'm doing it with my new pages.
Image names weren't mentioned but may work with the same principle.

[RuralWeb]

Image names weren't mentioned but may work with the same principle. They do and will add to the SEO mix as google checks image file names as well as page names;)

Page file names and images should contain your primary keyword/phrase for that page - this requires that you think about your keywords every time you are typing.

[george]

Gulp, sounds like a lorra work as Cilla would say.

[doug selby]

It seems to me that it would be best to convert all the underscores to hyphens in one go, and then use php in a custom 404 to filter your URIs, perhaps:

$pagename = $REQUEST_URI;
$pagename = ereg_replace("_", "-", $pagename);
with the appropriate redirect headers.
I'm sure it must be possible in .htaccess too - anyone care to make a stab at it?

[RuralWeb]

I dont think that - or _ makes that much difference to results on google, I do however see problems with changing - to _ ie producing lots of pages with similar names unless the server is cleaned. Also pages will be held in the index for many months causing errors. Just a thought!

[wjcampbe]

I'm with Malcolm on this - like all SEO work, a little bit at a time is best.

Decide the phrase the page will target, change the description wording to target that phrase, adjust the page name, make the htaccess redirect, publish the page. Wait for it to propagate - watch your web stats. Move to the next page.

There is advantage to having a mixture of fully optimised, partially optimised and non-optimised pages on a site, and even more so to constantly changing content.

[doug selby]

OK, I'm convinced. :D
In fact, I have quite a good turnover of products and a single product per page, so I guess I'll just change my brouchure pages, and then optimise new pages as I create them.
Thanks for the advice, guys.