Google To Recognise the Underscore

It has recently been reported at Wordcamp 2007 that Google is to change it’s algorithm concerning the use of underscores in URL’s.

Traditionally Google has not viewed underscores in URL’s as word separators. Therefore there was actually no benefit in having keyword rich URL’s as the Googlebot couldn’t actually see that the words were separated by underscores. It would read two words separated with an underscore as just one word, which did your rankings no good at all.

This announcement should bring a smile to the faces of anyone who has underscored in their URL’s as it is anticipated that their Google traffic will be going up just as soon as the change is enforced.

PS It was also confirmed that the use of key pairs, e.g. ?variable1=dog&variable2=cats in your URL do not effect rankings, but beware of using more than 3...

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