Comments on: Google underscores filenames

By: Itsme

Itsme — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:32:23 +0000

Gosh, you guys are so smart, you should start your own search engine. I’m sure it would surpass Google in no time.

Five minutes in Google would answer the question of why Google does what it does with underscores.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sun, 18 Apr 2004 01:41:09 +0000

I should have added that dashes are seen by googlebots as spaces.

By: Bruce Prochnau

Bruce Prochnau — Sun, 18 Apr 2004 01:38:42 +0000

I have also been studying this matter. One solution I have come up with is the DirifyPlus plugin for Movable Type.
http://mt-plugins.org/local/DirifyPlus_Readme.php
I use it like so:
MTEntryTitle dirifyplus=”sld”.php
Which gives me: name-of-title.php, losing the underscores. This doesn’t help large sites that would desire to change over though, due to broken links all over the place. I am fortunate in that I just changed domain names and servers. so was in a position to make a fresh start. Google should se that a change is required due to thew huge number of sites that now use the underscore in filenames.

By: erik

erik — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 04:06:50 +0000

interesting find.
any idea if dashes — get tokenized?

By: EricaLucci

EricaLucci — Wed, 13 Aug 2003 05:42:02 +0000

I can’t believe I find this topic absolutely fascinating, but I do. Thank you for teaching me something new.

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 22:34:43 +0000

I’m totally talking out of my tushie here, but is it possible that that’s deliberate on Google’s part, as a bit of an anti-Googlebombing countermeasure? These “blogs” are dangerous things, you know, when it comes to Google’s precious search results.

By: Anil

Anil — Tue, 12 Aug 2003 22:26:10 +0000

I’d seen a similar analysis of Google’s ignorance of underscores before, but I can’t think of a “smarter” way for us to dirify names. The only other obvious options are periods or plus signs, but they both seem much less readable, and other indexing software tends to be fussy about such things.

We’ve seen that TypePad sites tend to do *really* well in Google indexing, and they’re using underscore dirifying. I suppose the page titles are making up for the filenames. I’d love to find out more options for us to consider in MT 2.7 and in MT Pro and TypePad, as we keep working to de-cruftify our templates.