I am a fresher and my TL told me to use '-' instead of '_' in filenames like
file-name.php instead of file_name.php
But he didn't told me why. He said that it is rule, but it sounded funny to me.
Can anybody tell me the main reason behind it??
Thanks
There isn't a very strong reason, certainly not so much that one would call it a rule, but there is a reason you might use hyphens.
When Google sees words separated by hyphens, it treats them as separate words, when they are separated by underscores it doesn't. Or at least, that was the case back in 2006 and I don't know that it has changed since.
So there is no effect on your actual code, but there is an effect on how your site is indexed, which affects how useful your code will be in terms of users being able to find it.
You could of course use routing to work around the urls anyway - indeed you probably will in most real-world work - at which point it comes down to personal preference once more.
Is there any documentation for the Spotify Web API as to which characters are valid when searching? For example "Macklemore & Ryan Lewis" needs the & to be url encoded in order for the request to work.
The character ":" is completely invalid it seems. In order to search for an album like "Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded", I have to remove the : completely from the String. Even URL encoding it doesn't work. This probably was to do with the fact that : seems to be used to separate the fields of the query.
Other characters like .[()/ seem to work ok. Any docs on this anywhere? Just want to know we are being comprehensive. Thanks.
Given the Björk example here,
http://ws.spotify.com/search/1/artist?q=artist:Bj%C3%B6rk
You'll need percent encoding. Not sure what technology you're using, if javascript, this answer should help - URL encode sees “&” (ampersand) as “&” HTML entity.
Update:
Colons are special characters used for advanced search. Queries involving colons need to be quoted, unless it's an advanced search :).
Restricting a search to multiple sites - is it possible to do this?
E.g. site:www.google+www.yahoo.com?
Bing does not provide a separate method of specifying which sites to search like Google's annotations. Instead, you need to add them as parameters in your query string. To do so, use the OR logical operator along with the site: specification. Bing prioritizes AND over OR, so make sure you put parentheses around the OR'ed terms. For example,
example search terms (site:google.com OR site:yahoo.com)
If you are adding a lot of sites, keep in mind that the total URL length must be less than 2048 characters, encoded.
Use OR operator and site: keyword.
E.g.
(site:http://superuser.com/ OR site:http://stackoverflow.com/) (some query)
It should work in most of the search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.
Note: It's important to use capital letters for operators such as AND and OR, otherwise it could not work.
Format your query like this:
site:dell.com OR site:ibm.com "search phrase"
So each site/domain with OR between. Tested seems to work for both Bing and Google.
Syntax shamelessly taken from searchenginewatch.com.
All the articles I Googled on this subject are dated back in 2004-2005.
Basically I am structuring precanned searches, and it is based off of categories the client will input.
Example
content/(term name)/index.htm
Does it matter if I used the raw term with a space, which is converted to %20 in the URL, or should I convert the link to '-' and remove that before querying for results?
I already have it working, but does anyone know if this definitely has a negative impact on SEO and ranking?
No impact on SEO. A - just looks nicer, that's all.
You'd use %20 if you needed to preserve the exact term including a proper space when you read it back from the URL. Probably you don't.
I personally think it should be "-"
I don't remember seeing a website that was using %20
"-" is one character and %20 is three, so you can put more stuff visible in the address bar
for an example, what is better
Do spaces in your URL (%20) have a negative impact on SEO?
or
Do spaces in your URL (%20) have a negative impact on SEO?
Yes don't use them - Google, Yahoo and bing does not know how to leverage the spaces and more importantly you are wasting good opportunity to communicate both with the consumer and search engines more about your product or page URL and what the topic of the content is all about.
However, sometimes it can't be helped because you have a website / ecommerce site for years and the site is indexed and already on good page ranking.
In that case, if you do want to get better naming convention, you will want to re-name the urls but take all of the existing url with space and place it into 301 redirect and map them to the new urls.
%20 does not effects SEO but it will destroy the readability of your URL. since the CMS have taken all the intention, so now it's easy to set-up dynamic URL structure. I recently read an article on SEO Friendly URLS which will help you to avoid Google penaltyimprove your chances to rankandmake your links meaningful hope it helps.
As mentioned, it really doesn't matter from a search engine perspective. With that being said, however, it's generally not good practice to use spaces in URLs (%20). Replace it with a dash or concatenate it.
I use blogger and while adding labels to blog post, the link to that label page has space which is converted to "%20" but i have no control over that with blogger. When I try to make the labels with '-' instead of space they are not nice to humans, so i go with spaces and "%20" in urls, i think this should not affect SERPs.
We use "%20" all over the place on our website and have not experienced any negative effects. We began doing this about two years ago, and at that time a few search engines had problems, but they have since disappeared. Some browsers will display a "%20" in the address bar, while others will display an empty space, but this really doesn't matter.
We're not so sure though that this has any positive effect on ranking, though it definitely has no negative effect. The thing to remember about Google is that while having a keyword as part of the base url, such as www.greatwidgets.com, is very helpful, using keywords as part of the page url, example: www.myexample.com/widgets.htm does not appear to result in any advantage. What matters is the page content and how many other pages out there have the exact same content. Also, incoming links from relevant websites with high rankings, without the rel="nofollow" tag are extremely important.
You cannot "trick" Google with fancy-looking URLs and h1 headers. That's right, h1 headers mean nothing, because Google doesn't require your input to tell them what's important.
Remember, if you're selling products and copying content from the manufacturer's website (or the competitor's website), Google's PANDA is going to be very angry. You'll need to reword your content so that it's not a verbatim copy from some other website. Google rewards originality, and severely punishes plagiarism. Seriously, PANDA will put the offending page on page 50 until it's brought into conformity with Google's policy on duplicate content.
Always use sitemaps to help the search engines.
I believe it looks better in a link if an underscore (_) is used.
content/term_name/index.htm
content/term-name/index.htm
content/term%20name/index.htm
It's better to use "-" instead of %20 since it shows unprofessional coding to the search engines and to the visitors. You really think a visitor could remember a URL with %20 ? Make the pages for the users and not for the search engines. You will get the most benefit form this and SE will appreciate it.
according to my view spaces in url should not be there as this is not good practice. we should use hypens between the URLS. the website should have sitemap.xml file.
according to my view spaces do have negative impact on seo. and secondly when creating a url structure hypens should be placed instead of underscores.
yes they do have negative effect as it effects the user experiences. the users would like to have easy to remember urls. google suggest you should seperetae your words with ' - ' and ideally not to use '_' or spaces '%20' .
Something else to consider is that if you use spaces in your URLs, it will break automatic URL detection in many software (e.g. emails, chat, etc) where they think that a space is the end of URL. This might impact negatively the "sharability" of your URLs.
Using spaces in URLs is still not common practice in 2020 and Google still recommends to use - instead:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en
Is there a way to search the web which does NOT remove punctuation? For example, I want to search for window.window->window (Yes, I actually do, this is a structure in mozilla plugins). I figure that this HAS to be a fairly rare string.
Unfortunately, Google, Bing, AltaVista, Yahoo, and Excite all strip the punctuation and just show anything with the word "window" in it. And according to Google, on their site, at least, there is NO WAY AROUND IT.
In general, searching for chunks of code must be hard for this reason... anyone have any hints?
google codesearch ("window.window->window" but it doesn't seem to get any relevant result out of this request)
There is similar tools all over the internet like codase or koders but I'm not sure they let you search exactly this string. Anyway they might be useful to you so I think they're worth mentioning.
edit: It is very unlikely you'll find a general purpose search engine which will allow you to search for something like "window.window->window" because most search engines will do some processing on the document before storing it. For instance they might represent it internally as vectors of words (a vector space model) and use that to do the search, not the actual original string. And creating such a vector involves first cutting the document according to punctuation and other critters. This is a very complex and interesting subject which I can't tell you much more about. My bad memory did a pretty good job since I studied it at school!
BTW they might do the same kind of processing on your query too. You might want to read about tf-idf which is probably light years from what google and his friends are doing but can give you a hint about what happens to your query.
There is no way to do that, by itself in the main Google engine, as you discovered -- however, if you are looking for information about Mozilla then the best bet would be to structure your query something more like this:
"window.window->window" +Mozilla
OR +XUL
+ Another search string related to what you are
trying to do.
SymbolHound is a web search that does not remove punctuation from the queries. There is an option to search source code repositories (like the now-discontinued Google Code Search), but it also has the option to search the Internet for special characters. (primarily programming-related sites such as StackOverflow).
try it here: http://www.symbolhound.com
-Tom (co-founder)