Usage of underscores in Meta field

[paulmcdonald]

I haven't been able to figure out why someone would use underscores to tie keywords together into a single phrase. I assumed doing so would require an exact match in the search such as using double quotes in a Google search. We are using v3.

There was this article,Using meta tags in Knowledge Base articles to improve SEO and reduce incidents, but my testing shows that the underscores don't matter in the search results.

For example:

Search Phrase: hi notification problem

KB Short Description: lorem ipsum

KB Description: Test

KB Meta: hi_notification_issues, hi_notification_resource, hi_notification_troubleshooting, hi_resource_troubleshooting

The search phrase, even though there isn't an exact match in the Meta field, still returns the KB article unexpectedly. Am I doing this wrong?

[paulmcdonald]

Maybe heidi.schnakenberg can help with this question?

[Erich Zirnhelt]

Hi paulmcdonald,

unless the string is recognized to be part of a version-like pattern (see here) the underscores will be indexed as spaces. This means, unless you have other content that more closely matches on the search terms, this one article will match on "hi", and on "notification" even if "problem" is missing.

[paulmcdonald]

Hi zirnhelt,

If the underscores will be indexed as spaces, then what is the purpose of using the underscores in the Meta field? I find that it makes it more cumbersome to add content to that field as underscores don't have a normal usage within the English language. Maybe the author of the article in my original posting in this thread, heidi.schnakenberg, will know more.

I did find that when you want to tag a ServiceNow article in these public forums like the one I tagged in my original post in this thread, that entering the underscores helped (i.e., "@using_meta_tags_in...") to find the article as blank spaces break the lookup search.

[Erich Zirnhelt]

Hi paulmcdonald - I agree it can seem more cumbersome, but we had an alternate motive: Google.

I shared in a blog post a few years back that we had made our KB content public, and part of that exercise was ensuring we had the best SEO metadata available to Google and other crawlers.   So, although Zing treats underscores as spaces, Google will index them as an ordered multi-term string. We chose underscores over hyphens for this reason. (Note: Google evolves constantly and decisions we made a few years ago may not be as relevant today.) It had no negative impact on Zing, and had a possible positive impact on Google.