In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for July 24, 2007:

Peak Points, a Google Analytics Suggestions [Google Blogscoped]

The suggestion here is for Google to add labels or indicators to peaks in traffic that would show what was causing the surge in traffic. Maybe a certain referrer suddenly spikes in traffic (like when you get dugg). Maybe a certain piece of content begins to grab a bunch of links. I think it’s a great idea and one that I’m sure Google could work out. I wouldn’t mind seeing the same kind of label for valleys as well as peaks.

Hyphens & Underscores Are Now Treated Equally in Google.com [Search Engine Roundtable]

Google is changing the way it handles hyphens and underscores when its crawler encounters them. Previously, hyphens were seen as word separators and underscores were not. With the change in place, both would be treated as word separators. For example: under the old way, internet-marketing-monitor would be crawled as “internet marketing monitor” and internet_marketing_monitor would be crawled as “internetmarketingmonitor”. Not so any more. Both examples would be crawled as “internet marketing monitor”. If you ask me, it never made sense for Google to treat underscores any differently in the first place. If I want something to get index as “claypot” I’ll just type “claypot”. Why would “clay_pot” ever mean “claypot”?

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