- What are the pro’s/con’s to using + _ - or %20 in URI names? Which performs better in searches, or is it better to have URIs with no connectors between words (withnospaces)? Yes, I could conduct tests, but I was hoping someone beat me to the punch.
- non-.com/net/org websites - do these ‘weight’ in searches the same as the newer ones (.info/biz/co, etc).
- Mobile searching - in your experience, does it return the same results as regular searches (from my experience it seems to)
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Search engines couldn’t care less. They are pretty smart about picking out individual words from a concatenated string. So what’s best? Think about what works for people typing URLs in. The easier the better. If it’s just two or three words, I would usually just runthemtogether … as long as they are all words and not abbreviations/acronyms, and as long as it doesn’t give a ‘Pen Island’ type problem. For longer strings, it might be easier to break them up with - or _, and there it is easier to use - because ‘dash’ takes less time to say than ‘underscore’, is one keypress rather than two, and won’t be masked by an underline like a _ can.
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Search engines couldn’t care less. If your site is worth ranking, they’ll rank it, no matter what TLD it uses … the only proviso there is about location-specific domains, eg don’t use a .uk domain unless your principal business is in the UK.
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Mobile searches often return more or less the same results, but sometimes there are slight differences … either a mobile version of a site is given instead of the main site, or the list of sites themselves might be slightly different if Google reckons one is much better set up for mobiles than another.