File Names and SEO

Hi Jill,

I have been getting your newsletter since 5/02 & try to use all your tips. I
have a question that I have never seen addressed & it may be because it’s
not important.

Does what you name a page (not the “Title” but the file name) matter to
search engines when they crawl a site?

In other words, I can name a page without underscores like this:

genuinebranditems.html

…or use underscores like this:

genuine_brand_items.html

My real question is do the underscores have an impact on how the spider
crawls the site or are long file names better? I’m thinking it doesn’t
matter but would like to be sure. I’ve been trying to name my pages
(filename & title) with a relevant keyword but sometimes it’s difficult.

Also does a file name have any impact with ranking at all?

Thanks!

Lola

++Jill’s Response++

Hi Lola,

File names in general don’t have much effect on rankings, contrary to what
many people think. However, if you do want to use keywords in them, you’d
want to use a dash, not an underscore.  Underscores are treated as a
character and not a space, and therefore the words in your file name would
not be parsed (read separately) by the search engines if they were to try to
read them.  (Note for readers: Please don’t write me and say that Google
highlights words separated by an underscore in the search results, so they
must parse them.  Highlighting is highlighting and not the same thing as
actually parsing the words.)

We have lots of previous articles on this topic in the newsletter archive, on the forum,
and in the SEO FAQ.  Also, I plan to do an updated article on this topic as soon as I have the chance because this question is one that is asked at least 3 times a day at the forum!

Whatever you do, don’t change your existing file names just to add a keyword
phrase, because that would simply cause more problems than it would solve.

Hope this helps!

Jill