Does google see a hyphenated keyword phrase in a URL the same or differently than a non-hyphenated keyword phrase? More importantly, we will test if there is a ranking difference.
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I like these types of test a lot and I like them because they come up in client meetings. Clients are “Should we squish them all together or should we have hyphens?” and you as the SEO sage has to say it’s probably this or probably this and hoping that it is right. So we looked at it, without much fun fare, it is the hyphen. Use the hyphen rather than squishing your phrase together.
The really fun thing that came out of this though was the second part of the test. Just in case we are dealing with index issues, what we did was we took a set of test pages that were already indexed and then we added a non-hyphen phrase and then a hyphen phrase to two of those pages. The hyphen won but what was interesting was the original keyword that these pages were ranking for were not affected.
When you search for the phrase that was added, the hyphened URL wins. When you search back on the original keyword, there was no movement. As I said on this analysis, what you’ve got, in this example say you have plumber red bicycle just as your random phrase. Plumber is one keyword, red bicycle is another. Red bicycle does not affect plumber.
If you have messed up and you have plumber-redbicycle switched together, you would not affect your ranking based on the signal of plumber on your URL. The reason that this is important is sometimes you’ve got some out of the box sites and they may put a lot of garbage in the URL, so you’ve got your targetphrase-anumbersequence or numbersandletters, my concerns always was that Google hated that or that it would harm your target phrase, it turns out it doesn’t.
As long as you’ve got your target phrase, target keyword, and it’s hyphened, and everything else is hyphened and it is off on its own, it won’t affect what you are actually SEO-ing.
Meredith: What about underscore?
I haven’t tested it but I’ve actually got that test on the list because that was the next thing I thought about – what about the underscore?