So I lied… I will think about Search a little

July 26, 2007 |

And its getting late! But I have to, I just noticed Stephan Spencer’s CNET News post about Matt Cutts’ presentation at WordCamp. Seems the reclusive Google is in a revealing mood lately (earlier this month, Vice President of Engineering Udi Manber shared some tales of Google’s technology) as Matt put to rest some open questions about Google’s algorithm while revealing a change that bodes well for some web sites:

Google treats parameter based URLs with a query string the same as static URLs. As long as there are no more than two or three parameters in the URL. - I’d still stay away from them if only because parameters are meant to change to create the content of a page, why would you want an engine indexing such dynamic content.
The number of slashes in your URL (folder depth) isn’t a factor in Google rankings. - It is still rumored to matter for Yahoo and MSN though; I’ve had my own challenges with this lately
Underscores in a URL are OK. A page name such as blue_shirts.html will be properly read by Google as “blue” and “shirts” instead of “blue_shirts” - Interesting implications for del.icio.us where we’ve long been frustrated that they only allow multiple word tags with an underscore.

Happy optimizing!

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Tags: Google, Cutts, SEO, underscores, optimization