This has been a long and heated discussion and we hope it will come to an end sooner than later, but it’s still ongoing.
Dave, over at SEJ, revisits the dreaded “hyphens vs. underscores” debate.
I discussed SEO Image Naming in the SEO Tips column here five months back. The ideas I wrote on are the same as they are here.
When people are searching for images — or web results — keep in mind what they are searching for.
Google, however, is still “penalizing” sites with underscores — unintentionally. Such as Dave describes, there are a whole lot fewer results for search_engine_optimization than there is for search-engine-optimization or “search engine optimization.”
Google has yet more work to do on their search engine. We do know that much.
November 26th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
I think word of the “penalization” for underscores has reached enough webmasters for them to make the necessary changes to FUTURE content additions, however I feel bad for older websites that have a vast amount of images that are named with underscores because frankly no one really wants to go back and rename hundreds of images.
November 26th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Cary,
That’s very true. A lot of older sites should have picked up the ball and ran with it to start using hyphens, but some older CMSs out there are using a set permalink structure which would be hard to change.
That said, some sites simply cannot change. Newer sites simply start with the preferred permalink structure, such as Wordpress sites (like this one!)
November 26th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Interestingly enough, I received my bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design a little over a year ago and both of my professors in web design classes taught their students to name images using underscores. Any idea how recently these “penalizations” came into public knowledge? I only ask because I’m curious if this is semi-new news, or if my professors just came from an older school of knowledge. It would seem beneficial for them to have taught myself and other students about such things.
November 26th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
Cary,
It’s probably been a couple years that it’s been happening/being recognized.
Because they are graphic design professors, I doubt they know anything about or even care about SEO. For all practical purposes, it doesn’t matter if you use hypens or underscores. But for SEO purposes, it shouldn’t matter either, but it does — still.
Take a look here to read even more around the blogosphere of what’s going on with it.
November 26th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
By the way, I know this is completely off-topic, but I figured I’d mention it and ask out of curiosity since you seem to be rather responsive and informative thus far. Since I’m relatively new to the SEO/webmaster scene and I personally don’t have a blog, I’m curious as to your reasons for using rel=nofollow on your comments. This is an issue I’ve been reading quite a bit about. Obviously using the nofollow tag helps to prevent comment spamming, however you seem to be pretty good about being ontop of moderation, thus negating the need for the tag. Do you ever feel you are doing your readers a dis-service by having the nofollow tag?
November 26th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
I don’t see any nofollow links :) [click here]
I remove them after 14 days of having an active comment on my site.
Thanks for bringing it up though.