Page Titles - Are Dashes a Problem?

[amyhuffman]

We have recently made changes to our website www.nationallawforms.com. The page titles changed - for example http://www.nationallawforms.com/real...ware-hud-1.htm. Does the - have a negative effect when our site is crawled? We are having trouble getting picked up by Google and other SE's. We are all over on Pay per Click. Any thoughts?

[Jerry]

the dashes in the file names should have absolutely no effect on spiders. Better to check that you are using a robots.txt file and that your META tags and title tags are relevant to the content of the pages.

Cheers

[bhartzer]

jerry is right, hyhens (dashes) have no effect. As long as the spiders can get to your page they'll crawl it.

[paulhiles]

Does the - have a negative effect when our site is crawled? We are having trouble getting picked up by Google and other SE's.

Hi Amy, it looks like you actually mean the naming of uri's or URLs, depending on your definition.
As far as I'm aware, there's no negative effect in using hyphens / dashes in folder names or page names.
One theory was that the dashes were seen as spaces in between keyword loaded filenames, however recently I've seen evidence that Google is able to pick out keywords from strings of consecutive words without any dashes or hyphens.

Hope that helps, in the meantime I'll move this post into Search Engine Discussion where you should get further replies! :o)

Paul

[amyhuffman]

Thanks to everyone for the useful info. If you have any other site suggestions, I am ready for an earful. This is the first time posting in the forum, but I am sure you will see more of me.

Many thanks again.

Amy