blazin's Journal: [Ask a subset of /.] Mod_rewrite and google indexing

I am working on some code to rewrite some urls on our website which are currently something like:

http://www.domain.com/phones/phoneDetails.php?id=39

to

http://www.domain.com/phones/details/39/Motorola%20RAZR.html

I think that something like

http://www.domain.com/phones/details/39/Motorola_RAZR.html

is more easily human readable but I've been told that google will index the one with the %20 with keywords for both Motorola and RAZR, while the second one will be indexed with Motorola_RAZR and people searching for just RAZR will not be able to find it as easily.

I am not a big fan of spaces in URLs, and I have a hard time believing that the braniacs at google would have any trouble extracting Motorola and RAZR from the url with an underscore. Does anyone know for sure which way google prefers, or have any resources about what sorts of things google looks for in the URL that help page ranking?

Thanks in advance.

Random thought

[turg]

I have no real info, but it seems to me that Motorola+Razr should work the same way as Motorola%20Razr

Re:Random thought

[turg]

Also, I don't know about URLS but in the text on the page Google seems to treat all non-alphanumeric characters as spaces.

Re:Random thought

[blazin]

I think that is probably true. The weirdness is in the differences between a search for "Motorola RAZR", "Motorola_RAZR", "Motorola+RAZR" and "Motorola%20RAZR". Of course I'm not really trying to get good page rank for the last three, but it is interesting that the results are different for those searches. I've heard that having the search term in the URL is good for pagerank... I guess I'll find out sunday evening.

Re:Random thought

[Short Circuit]

I was thinking the same thing. Go with + ... I find that even more readable than _.

Re:Random thought

[turg]

Also, I don't know if this applies to URLs but in content Google treats (almost?) all non-alphanumeric characters as spaces.

Re:Random thought

[blazin]

That's funny. I actually find _ easier to read than + in a URL. Anyway, I think we've decided to try _ for this time and in 3 weeks we may switch to + and see how they do. Of course the way it's written now, you could do

http://www.domain.com/phones/details/39/Crazy_monk ey_lovin.html [domain.com]

and you'd still get the same phone page as if it had the phone name in the URL.

Re:

[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Doesn't google index

[blazin]

Yup google does index the contents of the page. I'd heard or been told that having the thing the page was about as part of the url, eg, the Motorola RAZR, is good for page rank. We weren't sure if it mattered if it were a space or _ or whatever. Thank you for the link. It sounds like it won't matter too much for us until people look for the phones with the inurl: search argument. I guess we'll find out what happens with it soon anyway.

Thank you.