Penalty for using hyphen in pages

vbSEO employs hyphen in page url. After reading a thread from webmasterworld, I think everyone should think about the issue if your site practices in combination with other spam flavors without acknowledging. Regardless, using hyphen in page url could be a potential risk holder - alone or with combination of other spammy flavors.

ref [ Penalty for using hyphen? ]

It appears that you must be a paid member to read that link.

Originally Posted by Keith Cohen

It appears that you must be a paid member to read that link.

The fun thing is that Google appears to crawl that page content.. but not allow to cache it. /hint

Originally Posted by Wuushu

The fun thing is that Google appears to crawl that page content.. but not allow to cache it. /hint

u sure ? i have a lot of pages in cache that are title-name.html

Are you a member? I'm not, and I get the same "JOin and pay blah blah" page whatever I do. And I'm pretty sure google didn't pay and join, to get their pages cached like a normal visitor..

1st, you don't have to be a paid member to read that page. But you do need to have a free user account. Brett (the admin at WMW) has been fighting rouge spiders and scrapers there for quite some time so he does some things to lock down the pages. Just signup as a free memeber to view the pages.

2nd, the real jist of that (and the coutless other) discussions on hypens is really related to domain names, not the page/file names. Read carefully:

Originally Posted by Brett_Tabke (with my added emphasis)

In general, the more dashes in a domain name, the less quality the site. All the se guys I have ever asked about it (alot), there is a direct corellation between falling site quality and increasing usage of the dash in a domain name.

"For every dash in a domain, the quaility rating of a site drops by that factor." - Paul Gardi - Teoma/Ask (Pubcon 3/2004 boston). Which was seconded by Tim Mayer of AllTheWeb and Matt Cutts of Google.

And if you're not an seo expert, you should especially remember that 1 thing usually doesn't inflict a significant penalty. It's usually a combination of factors that lead to a site getting penalized as spammy. For example, my flagship site that's sparkling clean & loved by the major SE's is keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.org. So hyphens in your url are by no means a kiss of death. You gotta look at the whole package because that's what the SE's are doing.

Good luck,
Ross

Thanks Ross

post update @webmasterworld

Quadrille writes:

Google does not mind hyphens, and they can help in searches.

But the help is very, very small - never enough to justuify renaming existing pages.

Also, multiple hyphens look just plain tacky - don't ask me why, but they do; until that changes,

domain.com/keyword1-keyword2/i-love-web-master-world-very-much. php

Looks cheap and nasty, and is unlikely to get you much business. It may (or may not) be a coincidence that 99% of of c*** ebook sales sites use that system.

Either way, ignore quadrille's law of hyphenation at your peril

"More than one hyphen is the international shorthand for idiot webmaster; More than two hyphens is the Galaxy-wide shorthand for "I'd be a spammer if only I knew how"

unni write:

Using hyphen or underscore is not a problem. Only thing is dont overdo it. Even Google has urls like

google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login?hl=en&utm_campaign=sitemaps-en-about&utm_source=EM&utm_medium=link
google.com/notebook/?utm_campaign=gnb&utm_source=us-et-labs
google-analytics.com

and some major sites

amazon.com/b/ref=amb_link_18469201_13/102-0770904-3522563?ie=UTF8&node=172421
download.com/Ad-Aware-SE-Personal-Edition/3000-8022_4-10399602.html?tag=pop

I have a really good experience with this issue. When i created a site in php, i created the urls from the product titles like a-b-c-223.html. Most of the pages were less than 4 hyphens. But only few product names was containing many words and so the urls were upto 10 hyphens. I didnt notice that at that time. So many pages went to supplemental. Recently i found out this problem and redirected the pages to four hiphens with

RewriteRule ^([^/\-]+)-([^/\-]+)-([^/\-]+)-([^/\-]+)-([^/]+)-([0-9]+)\.html$ http://www.domain.com/$1-$2-$3-$4-$6.html [R=301,L]

Within three days i found major changes in crawling pattern and serps, not only in Google but in Yahoo and Msn too.

So in my opinion try to limit it to 3 or 4 hyphens

If I have to do the installation again, I'll take an option "Limit URL Length" to 4 words in the vBSEO setting along with choice other than hyphen or underscore - that leaves us "dot." Many webmasters recommend not to use "_" for various reasons. I'm looking forward to hear more about the use of "dot."

If I decide to change the above mentioned options now, both the "length limit" and "." instead of "-" will return header with 301 redirect to google. For the past two days(aug 18), it seems many of the websites that went thru deindexing or simillar since the last april(my case here) or in between, starts to report a closer to normal indexing numbers where they are used to be. At the same time, many reports otherwise being supplemental again. For my case, the google indexing starts to improve closer to an half way through the level of early april. Here do I really want to send more of 301 redirects to google at this point? And "Mediapartners" for adsense need to recharge/recrawl as well. I guess I'll wait and see. Not knowing the real nature of the causation that we see by the google dance, at least it would be everyone's interest to reduce or cut any potential risk holder in advance.

While it's good to read opinions like the ones curator quoted, you might as well hear from someone who actually knows:

Originally Posted by Matt Cutts

To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url.

Also read Vanessa's comments on this:

Originally Posted by Vanessa Fox

Next, consider this page name:

123244ffgfhdsled99eddgdd.html

It doesn’t take a special tool to know that the URL isn’t user-friendly. Compare it to:

african-elephants.html

But you can have too much of a good thing. It also doesn’t take a special tool to know that this page name isn’t user-friendly:

african-elephants-and-their-habitats-and-diet-and-history-and-extinction-possibilities-and-this-page-is-really-great.html

And speaking of putting a dash in URLs, hyphens are often better than underscores [Ed. Note: bolded by Matt ]. african-elephants.html is seen as two words: “African” and “elephants”. african_elephants is seen as one word: african_elephant. It’s doubtful many people will be searching for that.

This is another time when vbseo is ahead of the game. They use dashes to create easy to read, se friendly url's, plus they give an option to limit the number of hypens in the page name so that we don't have "too much of a good thing."

So regardless of someone's seo skill level, vbseo is likely to always be a good investment.

Good luck, Ross

Originally Posted by curator

Many webmasters recommend not to use "_" for various reasons.

Well, then why does Wikipedia use the underscore VERY sucessfully?

Because they have a TRUST factor that outdoes any sort of issue with URL structure. If they changed to a - instead of an _ they would probably rank even better.

You can read more here about this:
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO » Back to Work

Comming from Matt Cutts' blog... notice the URL:
/mattcutts.com/blog/back-to-work/

And the vBSEO thread is the 5th in the Google top-list:
matt cutts penalty hyphen - Google Search
So it does not hurt anything.

I think Matt's just got a standard Wordpress install. He didn't tweak anything for seo. Part of his whole premise for starting that blog was to go thru the same processes that a "regular" webmaster ges thru.

But we gave him hell when he made some smart alec comment about "sure was easy to get my site into Google..."