Google's Matt Cutts on WordPress SEO, Underscores, and Slashes

[mandy]

# Matt claims that Google treats URLs with a query string the same as static URLs. Caveat: as long as there are no more than two or three parameters in the URL, that is! Put another way, you won't take a hit in your Google rankings if you have a question mark in your URL; just don't have more than two or three equals signs in the URL.

# Matt stated that the number of slashes in your URL (i.e. the number of directories deep your page is) isn't a factor in your Google rankings. He went on to say that although it doesn't matter for Google, it is rumored to matter for Yahoo and MSN (Live Search). Matt addressed this because I specifically asked the question from the audience.

# According to Matt, the file extension in your URL won't affect your rankings. So it's inconsequential whether you use .php, .html, .htm, .asp, .aspx, .jsp etc. The one extension you should avoid for your Web documents? .exe...

full article: http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9748779-7.html

[mandy]

More:

In August 2007, Matt made a post on his blog that read: “some people thought that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point.”

So what does all this mean? Google DOES NOT treat underscores and hyphens the same - underscores are currently not counted as spaces.

I recommend making a new site using hyphens in the URL as does Matt. He also said, “But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes.”...

full article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/googl...hens/6010/