%20 (space) affect SEO?

[swee]

As i am using ANchoR tag for my pages and some of the name i give it following:

<a href="#Egyptian Cotton - Poplin"> and what it appears on the URL will be "hst.com.sg/.../egyptian%20Cotton%20-%20.." will the space or rather the "%20" affect the Spider from searching us?

I would like to hear some of the opinions fr everyone asap. Thank you.

Yours,
Swee

[DBurrows]

Our SEO company have told us to use hyphens to link words in page names to acheive best search results, i believe spaces rank below underscores, which in turn, rank below htphens.

[swee]

However, by adding a "hypen", will the Spider not understnad? Does he know what is "egyptian-Cotton"? as compared to "egyptian Cotton". As i'm using it as an ANCHOR TAG, which mean, i only want it to be understoood by the spider rather than by the USERS. So Would u think ADding Hypen would be good? or Not adding One?

[AsleepATheWheel]

>Our SEO company have told us to use hyphens to link words in page names to acheive best search results, i believe spaces rank below underscores, which in turn, rank below htphens.

This type of thing changes all the time in the search engines, with most of them currently seeming to take them all to just be read as spaces. Why would one be ranked above another? It is best to find a convention that you understand, and are happy with.

Paul

[thomas]

for best results

for search engine results it should be yourdomain.com/egyptian_cotton.htm and this page should have been optimized for the words "egyptian Cotton"

However the second best would be yourdomian.com/acatalog/egyptian_cotton.htm and you mention egyptian cotton as often as you can within reason!

The "_" is treated as a space and in most design for web you should seperate you file etc with one ie: beach_photo.jpeg

[AsleepATheWheel]

>However the second best would be yourdomian.com/acatalog/egyptian_cotton.htm

How can you make statements such as this. This is your opinion, not fact. Have you anything to back it up with? Also as a general convention an underscore _ is not a good chariacter to use. The reason for this is obvious, does this:
www.widgets.com/egyptian_cotton.htm
Have an underscore in it or not? Not very user friendly is it?

>you mention egyptian cotton as often as you can within reason!
Just be carefull spamming the search engines, you can get in to trouble...

[thomas]

Most things on forums are peoples options, as for fact I suggest that swee check out www.highrankings.com in the forum and ask the same question to see what the general response is and from your previous post I understand you are getting your information from your seo company.

The “within in reason” is to stop spamming I was trying to point out that many people would take a term like Egyptian cotton and repeat it to many times to spam the search engines.

To back up my “However the second best would be yourdomian.com/acatalog/egyptian_cotton.htm” we have a site with actinic and the pages generated in the catalog do not leave much scope for great search engine optimization, for example goolge ignores meta tags so how can you produce a page for widgets and put in your text the keyword density that you would like, anchor text, h1 headings etc therefore if you can produce a page within your site that allows for search engine optimization to link to you actinic page.

The underscore is meant to be read for example actinincsoftwarenumberone.htm is not as easy to read for the customer as actininc_software_number_one.htm

[AsleepATheWheel]

There is also some great material here:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourc...hen+underscore
This is a discussion that has been going on a long time.......

As for my own opinion, and generally what Jill of www.highrankings.com advocates, don't design for the search engines, design for people.

www.widget.com/actininc_software_number_one.htm
Is much less friendly to the eye than
www.widget.com/actininc-software-number-one.htm

Someone that isn't web savvy would simply think there were no underscores there. If they write down the URL, they aint going to be getting it right, that could be a lost customer.

[thomas]

crossed wires

paul I think we have crossed wires when I use a "_" my pages appear as something_page.htm but when I read your posts they read
"something page.htm" which would not register as a page name because of the space.

[OldWelshGuy]

Hi All, first post here, I tripped over it from another forum. Couple of things here that are like Thomas mentioned, 'crossing over'.

Firstly if you have a space in your URL, then anythig bar a windows server is going to struggle with it, as it actually gets replaced with all sorts of %20% stuff like that. NEVER use a space in your file names, many spiders choke on it, and many servers can't handle it.

Secondly, how do you break up the file name? Well, And I hate to disagree with Thomas, but the underscore_ is not read as a word break, so 'actinic_community' is read as 'actinic_community' one continuous word, whereas 'actinic-community' is read as two separate word like this actinic & community.

Now this brings us onto a whole new ball game. Because people have been using hyphens in just about any place they can, the top Search engines have stareted looking a little more closely at sites with multiple hyphens. Sites like www.buy-best-wedding-stuff-uk.co.uk, have been getting more attention, and sites who use hyphens in page and folder names run a higher risk, e.g.
www. buy-best-wedding-stuff-uk.co.uk/ wedding-suppliers/ wedding-transport/ blahblah.htm
Sites who have abused the file structure like this can look forwad to getting filtered out in the future.

Sorry to be so forceful on my first post, but it is something I am confident with, working as an SEO.
<added> After re reading this I can see now that we are talking about anchor text rather than filenames etc. IN the case of anchor text, forget hyphens and underscores etc, and type absolute normal text. The spiders treat text differently according to the tag it appear in within the HTML!

OWG

[DavidGeran]

The Actinic approach using underscores is not frowned upon by google (our own results prove that), so I shouldn't worry at all about that. I agree with AsleepAtTheWheel, design for the user and not search engines, and you'll probably find that the ideal page for both is actually very similar.

Old Welsh Guy, if you can predict Google's future filtration formula you should be typing your messages from your shiny new villa in Florida

[OldWelshGuy]

Old Welsh Guy, if you can predict Google's future filtration formula you should be typing your messages from your shiny new villa in Florida

Hi Dave, thanks for the welcome, I am not predicting anything, it has become apparent that Yahoo! are currently enforcing this on larger sites.

And, as if by Magic, and 'straight from the horses mouth' hav a look at the Googleblog (the official blog set up by google, housed on their own servers). Take a look at the last few lines http://www.google.com/googleblog/

So there you have it. Lately, I've been pretty quiet, but at some point I'll hit the Google blog again to hold forth on, say, which is better in a url: hyphen or underscore.

Later -- but hopefully, soon,

GoogleGuy

P.S. Usually, it's a hyphen.

All the best

OWG

And sadly I don't have a shiny new Villa in Florida, I am not fussy on Florida.

[swee]

Hey!!

Thanks for the GALLION Response. anyway, I would like to reinEnforce one thing, I am hereby asking about the 'anchor text' which i should save it as and not the 'file name' in case some are wondering. Next, i see some said 'design for the user' and not for search Engines? Yes, i understand this phrase.. Well, i wouldn't consider my site PERFECTLY, 100% user-friendly as i couldn't do that either. Still, i think my site is alright and at least 85% Friendly to navigate =) Just that, the page rank isn't good enough to bring me visible and place in the Google search Engine. Therefore, i am using "anchor Tag" as a way to Boost my website Pr.

Thus, i am searching help on whether if i should save my KEYWORD as Two seperate word (Egyptian Cotton) which will appear in <a name=' Egyptian Cotton'> and <a href = "www.hst.com.sg/../#Egyptian Cotton" and what appears on the URL would be "www.hst.com.sg/Eygptian%20Cotton".. those Hexidecimal symbols..So You guys were saying i shouldn't use SPACE at all? is it? But the fact is that, I do not need my user to understand those codes, i only want spiders to understand them. ANchor tags are for my own need and not for customer in this situatiion.

Anyone suggests?

[cdicken]

I suggest you use hyphens e.g. <a name='Egyptian-Cotton'> and <a href = "www.hst.com.sg/../#Egyptian-Cotton">

[AsleepATheWheel]

paul I think we have crossed wires when I use a "_" my pages appear as something_page.htm but when I read your posts they read
"something page.htm" which would not register as a page name because of the space.

This post proves my point exactly, just mousover the link, or copy it, and paste it into notepad. You will see that it is indeed "something_page.htm" but when changed to a link it looks like "something page.htm". This is the point I was trying to make, using a "_" is confusing, and makes it difficult to see what the link actually is.....