Matt Cutts on kw in your URL

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

Found this this morning. Thinks its a good piece of information about a long time dispute within the SEO community.

Don't know where the original post came from, I can't find it on Matt's blog or anywhere.

Here it is, per Matt Cutts:

Most bloggy sites tend to have words from the title of a post in the url; having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page.

I've believed this from the beginning. It doesn't take a genius to do a search and look at the amount of times the kw is in the url, but many have said that it doesn't matter.

IMHO I think Google places weight on it, but that several other factors play into the SERP's with them like registration date, kw density and bl's, and outrank them on a sliding scale.

But its still good to hear this from the horses mouth, considering overall I have several million pages over many websites designed this way already.

GaryTheScubaGuy

[Wit]

Yup, I read that too.

I just wonder what he meant by "judging the quality".

I also believe that urls like keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.php don't necessarily breathe 'quality'. So he may be judging in the sense of 'punishing'

I'm sure there's an optimal balance somewhere...

[kichus]

Yeah... about the balance... there is...

When am seeing a change in the URl here... I may think about re-writing my 'hy-phe-nat-ed' ones...

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

Yeah... about the balance... there is...

When am seeing a change in the URl here... I may think about re-writing my 'hy-phe-nat-ed' ones...

I wouldn't change them if they already have dashes. Cuttshas said _ and- are the same, but other SE's see it as a character.

[Wit]

I remember Cutts once saying that the hyphen was better for some ANCIENT reason.....

But IMV too many hyphens are evil

[kichus]

AFAIK...

'matt-cutts' == 'matt cutts'
and 'matt_cutts' == 'mattcutts'

I could be wrong though...

[GaryTheScubaGuy]

AFAIK...

'matt-cutts' == 'matt cutts'
and 'matt_cutts' == 'mattcutts'

I could be wrong though...

Bingo

[djstreet]

- used as a word seperator
_ is not

it is one of the many many many factors in SEO, albeit to a small degree....

[mandar-seo]

I have different thinking on - and _. I may be wrong though. I believe that both of them are equal from character grammer point of view. But when you go for the readability and usability '-'s are far more better than '_'s.
Search engine rate the higher which are user friendly. Consider the following:
search-engine and search_engine. The first one is easily identified as dash but the second one is a bit difficult to identify as underscore.
I think this is a sort of spamming (hyperbole) like same color font as of background. When you show something which is confusing it is spam (my definition). So -s are better than _s.

With regards,
Mandar Thosar

[kichus]

When you show something which is confusing it is spam (my definition).

Such confusion vary from person to person.... Isn't it???

Neither this says anything similar...

I think the later is more correct...