Google was asked some interesting questions by SEO’s and webmasters at the recent PubCon 2007. (PubCon is a Search Marketing Conference held every year) A couple of the engineers from Google’s Webmasters team answered them and I think they are pretty useful in knowing a little more about how Google actually ranks your site.

Dashes vs Underscores in URL’s and Keywords

This is one of the age old debates of should we use underscores or dashes to denote spaces in URL’s. From Google:

In general, we break words on punctuation, so if you use punctuation as separators, you’re providing Google a useful signal for parsing your URLs. Currently, dashes in URLs are consistently treated as separators while underscores are not.

They also did say that using sepators is good practice, its likely unnecessary to go and change your existing URLs just to convert underscores to dashes. Google is able to distinguish between things like bigleopard.html and not misinterpret it to be “bigle opard”. So don’t stress, just keep it in mind.

Subdomains vs. Subdirectories

Google said there are no major differences between the two. So keyword.site.com and www.site.com/keyword are pretty much treated the same. Matt Cutts did outline some things to consider regarding this issue, so maybe give it a read some time.

Keywords in URLs

As Google said, its always good to be descriptive across your entire site, so from having the ALT attribute on your images, to using keywords in the URL, as well as naming your images properly, all count in your favour. There are some tools in Google’s Webmaster Tools that will help with your content analysis and URL suggestions.

These issues above were some of the more interesting things that came out of PubCon 2007. If you aren’t yet, get your site onto Google’s Webmaster Tools and add Matt Cutts blog to your RSS reader.