Hyphens instead of underscores in URLs

[brentg]

Mindtouch creates a URL for a new page based on the display title and replaces spaces with underscores. For example:

Display title: My New Page
URL: My_New_Page

I'm told that Google treats underscores as if they join words, so the above page gets indexed as MyNewPage, and presumably wouldn't rank as highly for users searching for My New Page.

Is there a way to make Mindtouch default to hyphens (-) instead of underscores? So the URL would be My-New-Page?

I'm using Mindtouch 9.08.

Thanks,
Brent

[Guerric]

MindTouch translates spaces into underscores. This would be a feature request and an important one if google really does treat underscores as joining characters.

Can you file a feature request bug? And if you have a page that dictates how google indexes, that would be beneficial as well. If it's the case for joining, then this should be a higher priority item IMO.

[SteveB]

This would be a *major* code change. I'd need to see evidence that google does that before even considering it.

Alternatively, in 10.0, it's simple to set a specific title and URI combination in one operation. That might be the best way for you.

[brentg]

Thanks, Guerric and Steve. Our web team has examples of how words separated by underscores don't get indexed as individual words using the Google Search Appliance. They also referred me to these blog post/articles by others who've seen the same thing:

http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/seo-news/hyphen-or-underscore.php
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
http://www.stephanspencer.com/search...ord-separators
http://www.webproguide.com/articles/...-engine-logic/

What do you think?

Thanks,
Brent

[SteveB]

I think that's worthy to be filed as a feature request.

[roman]

It seems that this feature request is based upon obsolete information. About 3 years or go or so, Google made a change by starting to treat underscores as word separators. See http://searchengineland.com/its-not-...e-dashes-11854. And some (http://12pointdesign.com/advice/dash...nderscores.asp) claim better ad related results for URLs containing underscore characters.

[crb]

+1. It doesn't seem to hurt Wikipedia.