Title Name Affecting Search Engines?

[mark3738]

Recently I was asked to see if I could get a website loaded in the search engines and reasons it doesn't get crawled well. The owners had actually been diddled by their designer but we won't go there. However what struck me as odd was that every new section was named .index The contact page was contact/index.html the possum fur page was possum-fur/index.html and so on. Will having all these index pages confuse the robots at all or is the fact that I don't believe this is a very tidy method the only problem. I also once read that the underscore works better than the hyphen but this may be irrelevant. The main problem with the site was also no keywords or descriptions (only on homepage), or links, but I have sorted that out. I don't want to go too much further at present without having a major redesign and doubt that the owner wants that after paying someone else a large fee already.

[Mel]

I have seen sites built this way (each section having an index page) but it is a total waste of a good keyword opportunity IMO.

As far the use of the underscore or hypen is concerned, google sees and indexes the underscore as a sperate letter and does not always parse the individual words out, while with the dash it will be read the same as a space and the words parsed correctly.

[mark3738]

Thanks Mel. I was never sure which way the search engines would parse the hyphens and underscores, and as currently google is still the one that matters, you have answered my query nicely.