yahoo opti.

have any studied new yahoo about the url opt.

say , keywords "abc"

1.http://www.xxx.com/abc/abc.htm
2.http://www.xxx.com/a-b-c/a-b-c.htm
3http://www.xxx.com/a_b_c/a_b_c.htm



which one is better,Pls advise.

#2 is better

actually 1 and 3 dont work at all and arent really options.

why do you say 3 dont work at all?? i see files with underscores in the names instead of dashes in the top 10 all the time ...??

ps ... i just did a search for "how to find a farm in iowa" at yahoo and found this ...

farm auction iowa - Associatehelp.com
farm auction iowa - associatehelp.com is Your guide to earn money with website.
www.associatehelp.com/auction/farm_auction_iowa.php

and this (this guy could not make up his mind if he liked dashes or underscores so he used both)

Iowa state farm insurance - Get free quotes Online!
... quotes on state farm insurance for Iowa online. If you are a resident of Iowa and are ... now and recieve a free Iowa state farm insurance quote to quickly find ...
www.american-insurance-online.com/state_farm_insurance_iowa.asp

goodlittleboy and good_little_boy do not yield the words good little or boy in a search. a '-' is interpreted as a space but not a '_'.
your search example results are showing up in spite of this factor...not because of it.

well ... i'd be curious to know what would make you come to that conclusion ... i dont have any way to know how the robots would interpret those characters except to look at the serps they show ... and as a rule of thumb .... i see just about as many _ as i see - in the serps and they are neither one occurring consistently higher or lower ...

if the one resolves in a kw being read and the other not .... i would expect to see MORE of the one higher in the serps and less of the other higher in the serps ... and i dont see that ... i just took a quick look at two of my favorite 6 million page 3 word terms ... and each had 2 each of the - or _ in the top 20, one the - ranked highest, the other the _ ranked highest .... so that is my general observation ...

i happen to prefer the look of the - myself, but i know most programmers seemed to be hooked on using the _ in file names so maybe that is why you see a lot of those also ...

well...heres some logic.

yahoo search for 'romantic honey'.
'romantic honeymoon' is much more likely than 'romantic honey'.
however...there are no results with the word 'honeymoon' in them.
so yahoo does not split a multiple word chain into individual words.
you can get the same results by a search for 'honey getaway'....no 'honeymoons' found.
i am looking at the bolded words...since yahoo doesnt bold the url i can only assume that the same logic applies to it.

for the '-' yahoo and google are the same. google results for 'fishing-equipment' is lots of bolded 'fishing' and 'equipment' results. google even tells you at the top of the page that it is looking for 'fishing' and 'equipment'. the dash is ignored like a space. it doesnt give any priority to 'fishing-equipment' results. a yahoo search is the same.
to run a reverse test...search for 'minded'. lots or results for 'minded' as part of tough-minded...single-minded....marriage-minded...open-minded....and so on showing that google and yahoo break these words apart at the hyphen.

the '_' is different. google sees the underscore as a character. a google search for 'big_top' yields only 'big_top' bold in the results. no results show 'big' or 'top' or 'big top'. google even tells you its looking for 'big_top' at the top of the page. yahoo...for some reason...is different...it returns 'big top' and 'big' and 'top' for a 'big_top' search.

so to be safe in yahoo and google....do not use '_' in file names and urls and page titles if you want the words to be found.
...and do not smoosh the words together in file or folder names like...
'content/images/bigredhounddog.jpg'
use
'content/images/big-red-hound-dog.jpg'
instead.

:-D

well now that is interesting relax .... and studying this i must agree with one thing for sure .... google does consider the "_" as a character on its own as far as the text search goes ... but yahoo apearently just ignors it, like an "a" for "an" .. it is throw away character at yahoo ....

but ,, this is assumption a bit of a leap dont you think ...

*********
since yahoo doesnt bold the url i can only assume that the same logic applies to it
**********

it seems to me that looking at the url string, a different methodology is applied ... look at the big top serps ... they nearly ALL have big top in the url string, and MOST have it smashed together .... ALL of the top 6 it is "instring not separated" like the #1 serp ... "bigtop.org " or the third "bigtopshelters.com" ....

so it seems to me that they actually do "split a multiple word chain into individual words" as you say .... when it comes to the url string ....

for years the top serps are the kw.com sites .... even when there are multiple word keywords (widgetsforsale.com) .... so i do think all the se will "parse" the url string (unlike they will NOT do that in the text of the site) ... for keywords ....

i know they all go on about how they pay little weight to it now a days ... but i do not buy that .... i think they still weight it a fair bit ... and i think they find it with or without dashes ... and in JUST the url string underscores are probably fine too ...

but just the same ... with that said ... i do have to agree, it appears like the smart move is to drop the underscore .... and use a dash ....