Google’s Treatment of Underscores vs Hyphens – The Confusion

Back in July, Matt Cutts made the announcement at the WordPress Wordcamp that underscores are now treated as spaces in Google.

Blogs, webmaster communities, and SEO professionals rejoiced – but why does it seem Google DOES NOT treat underscores and hyphens the same.

Do a multiple word search with hyphens and underscores between the words and you’ll see what I mean.  If you’re lazy, a sample is done for you below:

• Results 1 – 10 of about 502,000 for “search engine journal”.
• Results 1 – 10 of about 502,000 for “search-engine-journal”.
• Results 1 – 5 of 5 for “search_engine_journal”.

Turns out, Matt Cutts didn’t make the annoucnement.  In August 2007, Matt made a post on his blog that read: “some people thought that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point.”

So what does all this mean? Google DOES NOT treat underscores and hyphens the same – underscores are currently not counted as spaces. (more…)