My question is how do hyphens in web site page names affect page rank?
I was just looking at my page naming convention, for instance: I have created a page which is supposed to do well for "special needs learning". Its called:
http://www.time4learning.com/learning-special-needs.shtml
Would I do better to name the page: http://www.time4learning.com/learningspecialneeds.shtml ?
This is a hard question to test, harder than just how hyphens affect the search terms put into google. Anyone have any expertise on hypens impact on keyphrases used in page names? I would expect that any answer (on the difference between separating words by spaces or hyphens) would have a similiar impact on metanames, metatags, keyphrases and seo in general.
As background, I tested and found that google treats these three seaches differently despite identical words (the only diference is spaces and hypens): Time For Learning vs TimeForLearning vs Time-For-Learning/ .
Google's results are very different: Time-For-Learning vs TimeForLearning vs Time For Learning
The search engines treat words mashed together as one big useless word. Words seperated by characters in general, and dashes and underscores more sepcifically, are treated as seperate words and will, for the most part, generate better key-phrase results. This is why at new millennium minds we studied blogs. The blog through Wordpress, which gives titles of blog posts real names like /Blog-post-One/ or /Marketing-On-The-Web/ produced better results than /category=1?.../
ReplyDeleteThis is also why carefully chosen keyphrases should try to match the URL with dashes. Time-For-Learning.com is a bit better than all one word.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. Does word order and the difference between the domain or page name matter? How do the words in this page weigh relative to each other: http://www.time4learning.com/2nd-grade-math.shtml.
ReplyDeleteOr, compare: www.a.com/b and www.b.com/a . Does one position better for a search for a?