Google changes meaning of Underscore Character

I just heard some search news that I would consider relatively huge. From google’s own Matt Cutts it looks like google is going to start accepting the underscore character as a valid delimiter in file and directory names. Before if you used the underscore like this:
http://example.com/example_widget.html the keywords example_widget would be viewed as one word by the engines, and of course no one is searching for example_widget.

In the past, the only valid delimiter between your file names was the dash "-". Because of this you see a lot of directory and file names like http://example.com/widgets-for-sale/example-widget.html. Using the dash in between the file names and directories told the search engines that the file name was actually a set of keywords, which were then used as one of the many onsite factors used to rank your page.

My take on this is if you already have pages that are using the underscore you might or might not want to keep them, but for the foreseeable future I would not start creating pages using the undersscor on any new pages. We will want to hear from yahoo and live to see if they are going to follow suit. Remember google is not the only search engine out there.

You thought you used to hate Wiki, just wait

At first I was pretty excited about the change to allowing an underscore. Mainly because I have some pages going back to 2001 where I used the underscore, and I never got around to changing them because of their lack of priority in my seo work. It will be nice to see if google will give me a little boost on those pages once the change kicks in.

As a SEO, I have always disliked wiki because the engines favored them because of their authority. Often times you will see wiki rank in the top ten SERPs when there are better sites out there, that just don’t have the authority that wiki has.

On one hand I like that they rank well because it shows how google splits the top 10 SERPS amongst different types of sites i.e. forums, stores, information site, blogs, etc. On the other hand I hate to see wiki where I want to be. One nice thing I have always counted on was that wiki has the nasty file names using the underscore, but going forward wiki is going to be able to get a larger portion of the organic results because their file names are going to count as being keyword rich.