Matt Cutts recently announced that underscores were soon to be treated as word separators in Google. At the moment, they are not treated as spaces, so “seo_consultancy” is not the same as ”seo consultancy”.
Whilst Ask, MSN/Live and Yahoo have always treated underscores as word separators , Google has not done so, and is in the process of making a change to its algorithm so that words with underscores are treated as separate words.
This change goes back to Google’s programming roots, but has been one of the things that we as an SEO company, and everyone else in the optimisation industry, has always urged people to change in order to rank better in Google. So in the future this will be one tip that we won’t need to recommend to our clients.
But looking a little wider, this introduction could have very wide implications, as thousands of websites that currently use underscores receive a boost to their current rankings. TypePad and Movable Type blog engines and the social news site Digg for instance, use underscores as a default separator, and these sites should see a boost in their results. It will be interesting to see what happens with Wikipedia entries, as there is already criticism about them high in the results pages, and Wikipedia also uses underscores to separate words.
We will certainly be keeping a close eye on the Google results pages to see when this change is implemented!
