Les Jones

E-commerce > Matt Cutts on Google Optimization

Matt Cutts has an interesting Web site on optimizing your Google search results. He recommends signing up for Google's Webmaster Tools. Among other things it allows you to see how Google views your site.

For instance, looking at the indexed pages will show you which pages Google visits most frequently. In general, it's the pages that change the most - typically the front page, news page, and RSS feed if you have one. Google loves RSS feeds because they're easy to parse and that's where the newest information is available. If your company doesn't have an RSS feed, set one up now. I use FeedForAll for Windows to generate ours, or you can install full-featured blogging software.

I found Cutts via a link to his opinion on whether you should use a hyphen or an underscore as a separator in filenames.

I’ve stylized the conversation quite a bit, but I remember how impressed I was that Google indexed numbers and some punctuation (come to think of it, search engines have come a long way in five years). With underscores, Google’s programmer roots are showing. Lots of computer programming languages have stuff like _MAXINT, which may be different than MAXINT. So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.

That’s why I would always choose dashes instead of underscores. To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines.