Google & Separators
-
This is not a question but something to share. If you click on all of these links and compare the results you will see why _ is not a good thing to have in your URLs.
- http://www.google.com/search?q=blue
- http://www.google.com/search?q=b.l.u.e
- http://www.google.com/search?q=b-l-u-e
- http://www.google.com/search?q=b_l_u_e
- http://www.google.com/search?q=b%20l%20u%20e
If you have any other examples of working separators please comment.
-
You probably already know this but there's a FF plugin called Google Global which you can use to search from other places if you wanted to check the differences easily
-
I have not tried it with proxies yet. The first test was from a Charlotte NC location. In the US you can change your location within Google's search. If you change it to United States you get what use to be the US results minus the localization. So you typically don't get maps when doing a search with the location set as United States.
I was using proxies to check results from different locals in the united states but found that simply changing my location via their location setting gave me the same results as the proxy from that location. But from what I understand, in Canada they don't give you the option to change your location. Is the same true in Australia?
If you look at this image you will find a "Change Location" above the map.
http://pestcontrolseo.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/pestcontrol_search.gif
-
Yes Australia. Didn't use any proxies.
-
You're searching from Australia? That is interesting.
If I take off the location, using United States as my location, I don't get local results either.
-
Strange, no local results for me. Only videos in one case or clean serps in all others. My guess is that it's location based.
-
Very interesting. I was just told the other day not use underscores in my image names... which I have done a lot. But my images seem to rank very well.
Did you note that Wikipedia actually has underscores in their site links? Found on all the variations above.
Also noted that I got local results with all but B_L_U_E_
When doing the search for P_E_S_T_ I found similar video and image results
But doing the search for p_e_s_t_c_o_n_t_r_o_l _ did not give me image results.
Why would long tail be different?
Fun one to add:
Again no local results for me on the last one, but yes on the prior two.
Thanks for sharing.
-
Ahhh of course... that's pretty cool. And the video file/save names possibly do have too. That's a quality experiment, you should expand it and do a YouMoz post!
-
954 underscores in the source code of the first result? God knows. I suspect maybe comment material has lots of underscore_usernames/
-
How interesting. Why do you think the underscores bring video results above, making the serps mismatch all the others?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
About how google works
Hey guyz,
Technical SEO | | atakala
I want to ask a basic question. If I search for Larry Page lets say.
I think google look for it's index for word larry and page distinct.
And mix it up. But the question ;
Can google show a result which only Larry exist on the page but any of the synonym or the stem of the Page not exist .
If it can happen how this page can be showned in larry page query. Thank you.0 -
Is Google suppressing a page from results - if so why?
UPDATE: It seems the issue was that pages were accessible via multiple URLs (i.e. with and without trailing slash, with and without .aspx extension). Once this issue was resolved, pages started ranking again. Our website used to rank well for a keyword (top 5), though this was over a year ago now. Since then the page no longer ranks at all, but sub pages of that page rank around 40th-60th. I searched for our site and the term on Google (i.e. 'Keyword site:MySite.com') and increased the number of results to 100, again the page isn't in the results. However when I just search for our site (site:MySite.com) then the page is there, appearing higher up the results than the sub pages. I thought this may be down to keyword stuffing; there were around 20-30 instances of the keyword on the page, however roughly the same quantity of keywords were on each sub pages as well. I've now removed some of the excess keywords from all sections as it was getting in the way of usability as well, but I just wanted some thoughts on whether this is a likely cause or if there is something else I should be worried about.
Technical SEO | | Datel1 -
Getting Recrawled by Google
I have been updating my site a lot and some of the updates are showing up in Google and some are not. Is there a best practice in getting your site fully recrawled by Google?
Technical SEO | | ShootTokyo0 -
Google authorship what am i doing wrong
Hi, i am using google authorship on my site but when i use the testing tool it is not working. before the upgrade we had it working fine but now it does not seem to work. we have our google plus account pointing to the site and the writer we are trying to add is not coming up on the tool here is the code we are putting on the page Google+ and the page in question is here http://www.in2town.co.uk/emmerdale/emmerdale-laurel-is-determined-to-take-action when i check the tool i get the following Authorship Testing ResultAuthorship is not working for this webpage.andAuthorship rel=author MarkupCannot verify that rel=author markup has established authorship for this webpage.the tool i am using to check is http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippetsany help to solve this problem would be great. i am using joomla
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Google does not show my website anymore
Hi All, We developed a new website for the domain: www.instral.com. Before we build the webste, the domain was indexed by google and was showed as first result on a search "Instral". Without a website! Only a super simple hostingprovider webpage. Now, with the new website, all the website pages are found in google from page 7... home page is not even in the results. When i search on "instral.com" in google, it will show my website on first result including homepage. Is there something wrong with the website or DNS settings? Or mabe some other webhosting setting... am i on a blacklist or something? Bing and Yahoo are showing better results (first page). I hope someone can help me out here...
Technical SEO | | extrememedia0 -
Is submitting your site to yahoo & Google still relevant
Good Morning from Sh@t its still raining wetherby UK... I want to just make sure the process i go through when a new site is launched is nort overlooking some fundamentals. Most sites we launch are not brand new, do allready have a link heritage and have been indexed by Google. With that in mid i do not submit a sites url thru the following links: www.google.com/addurl
Technical SEO | | Nightwing
search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx Am i right in saying you should really only bother with this if the site a newbie ie no history no link heritage and the site is enering cyberspace for the forst time. And i wonder if for example you launched a new site made sure the xml site map was in place and it had a few inbound links anyway it would be indexed anyway. So is the practice of submitting your url to search engined relevant anymore? Any insights welcome 🙂2 -
Sitemaps for Google
In Google Webmaster Central, if a URL is reported in your site map as 404 (Not found), I'm assuming Google will automatically clean it up and that the next time we generate a sitemap, it won't include the 404 URL. Is this true? Do we need to comb through our sitemap files and remove the 404 pages Google finds, our will it "automagically" be cleaned up by Google's next crawl of our site?
Technical SEO | | Prospector-Plastics0 -
Google not visiting my site
Hi my site www.in2town.co.uk which is a lifestyle magazine has gone under a major refit. I am still working on it but it should be ready by the end of this week or sooner but one problem i have is, google is not visiting the site. I took a huge gamble to redo the site, even though before the refit i was getting a few thousand visitors a day, i wanted to make the site better as i was getting google webmaster errors. But now it seems google is not visiting the site. for example i am using sh404sef and i have put friendly url in the site and on the home page it has its name and meta tag but when you look at google it is not giving the site a name. Also it has not visited the site since october 13th Can anyone advise how to encourage google to visit the site please.
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860