Underscores versus Dashes

I have no idea how I fell upon the underscores versus dashes debate but I did. I think it may have been in a Google-specific search engine optimization (SEO) forum. Anyway, GoogleGuy (I think he works for Google and communicates with the SEO public) said that Google would view file names with dashes as separate words. If underscores were used, then it would be viewed as one combined word. Apparently, in determining keyword rank, the URL is considered so you want to make those keywords as clear as possible. Basically, I needed to redo all of my file names to use dashes and not underscores – the default behavior of Movable Type. PS, this isn't actually new information, I'm just finding out about it now.

Off to the Movable Type forums for help I went and found a message that pointed me to a plug-in that would drop in the dashes. The plug-in URL no longer works. After some additional searching, I come to find out that the website (and plug-in) are no longer available due to the tragic passing of the author about a year ago. Short of asking someone for a copy of their plug-in, I found another solution. One blogger found the actual source code to modify. It was a simple switch. I figured at this point I had nothing to loose. Sure enough, it worked. I had to find the line in the current source code as his solution was based on an older Movable Type version. No worries, but I will have to remember to make this fix each time I upgrade my software. Hopefully, someone will have another fix by then. (Thanks Christopher for the easy fix!)

So here I am with a bunch of renamed files. I updated my .htaccess file to redirect all my old URLs to the new ones. I still have to delete the old files off my server. I don't want Google thinking I’m trying to gain rankings with duplicated content and punish me. I honestly wasn't trying to make more work for myself but now I have URLs with categories, full titles and dashes. Hopefully all this work ended me up with more SEO-friendly URLs.

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