Hi Forum,

I’m not an SEO, and I’m very confused . . .

1 – I have proof (below) that Google is not displaying content in PR order.

2 – In the example, the top-2 sites display with a space in the cached URL.

3 – I also noted that one of my pages that accidentally got a space in the URL is coming up higher then expected.

My questions please:

Any insights about not displaying results in PR order?
What else besides PR is being used here?
Is there something special about URL’s with spaces?

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http://www.seochat.com/?tool=7&option=com_seotools&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=oracle+job+interview+questions&result_mode=rel evance&num=10

This query for "Oracle job interview questions" shows the top entry with pr=4, the second site with pr=2 and the site third with pr=4.

It's not a space. It's an underscore character. Hold SHIFT and hit your hyphen key (beside the 0).

It's used fairly often in URLs to separate the various words, and from my experience it has a slightly positive effect. Nothing major, but enough.

Google uses a whole bunch of factors, both on and off the page, to evaluate a site. That's why pages with a low PageRank can outrank pages with a high one. Anchor text, keyword density, header tags, all that good stuff all become factors. PageRank is one of those factors that people tend to obsess over far too much these days. Just worry about building a good site for your users with as much good content as possible.

Adam as far as I've always understood search engines see words separated by an underscore as a single word and a dash is preferred instead. I'm pretty sure Google states somewhere on their that's how they treat underscores. If I can find it I'll post a link.

Even if they are fine with them one reason not to use underscores is becasue they do look like spaces in the address bar and in an underlined link which can confuse people what the correct url is.

Yeah i remember reading the same thing somewhere Van.

From what i remember google would see this_is_a_url as "thisisaurl" and they would see this-is-a-url as "this is a url".

Google never displays results based on the PR. It always displays the results based on backlinks and anchor text. If PR was the ranking factor google would have ranked yahoo on top for each and every keyword because probably it has PR 10.