php vs html for seo

[Jeff]

Originally Posted by georgeek

Google haven't been able to index on words in a url separated by underscores for the last 12 years.
- George

I will take your word on this; there must be some reason they don't want to consider the underscore as a space, but for the life of me I can't think of one? I'm just curious as it's plenty easy to use - instead of _, but why would google want to separate words by - and not by _. If anything, it would see more logical the other way... any speculation?

[georgeek]

Originally Posted by Jeff

...there must be some reason...any speculation?

It's probably historical because a hyphen has always been regarded as a legitimate word separator in many languages but an underscore has not. Matt Cutts says it was because someone searching for ftp_upload for example does not want to see the results for ftp upload and visa versa.

- George

[Jeff]

Yes, I guess I always thought of a hyphen as a "word combiner" where it links two related words that aren't a single word so I had trouble thinking of it as a word "separator" when I posted, but actually what we're talking about is a "word combiner" of sorts. Plus I guess the TLD convention of allowing a hyphen in the domain itself provides a precedent.

P.S. and thanks --I was actually using an _ for years thinking of it as a space replacement for non-naturally-hyphenated words until I read your tip a while back in another thread -- much appreciated.