Dashes vs. underscores are different because search engines see dashes as spaces, so /my-cool-blog is actually /my cool blog while /my_cool_blog is /my_cool_blog (a single word :)

Here's a page where Matt Cutts, head of Webspam on Google, explain: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/ Several other people working with SEO have come independently with this observation. And I am pretty sure I've seen a page from an Yahoo guy saying the same thing (but can't find right now).

dir/ecto/ries are used to divide content into "sections". One good example is:

/news/sports/basketball - News about basketball

/news/sports - Sports news

/news - All news

So you can have /news/politics and /news/economy too.

While if you do:

/news-sports-basketball it doesn't look like the division is there. Think a few years ago, when url mapping/rewrite wasn't much used. The / character was a actual physical folder/directory on the machine. Therefore, if you were a search engine, you would assume that everything under /news/sports/basketball falls into a "cluster" of related content. You would think that probably /news/sports/basketball/1 and /news/sports/basketball/2 are related.

Programmers don't click ads, FACT. Maybe programmers looking for travel information ;) but not researching for (usually) work related stuff. My HTF post got over 3k hits in 2 days. I really can't tell for sure, but I don't think there was a single click on my ads. Maybe one click, actually. The situation is worsened because the hn crowd is not simple programmers, we live and breath the net. So we're ad blind. The poor guy coding Java on a consulting gig on a branch of a financial firm, while he is more ad-blind than soccer moms, it's not something you can base your income (at least not only Adsense).

Now, I didn't optimize my ad placement, so I could do better. But from a ~0.70% CTR on my main domain to almost zero... that's quite a lot.

Of course, while programmers are generally ad-blind, it all depends. For example, selling .NET books on a .NET oriented website works...

While I agree that looking for a function on transmoggit is fast because of Ajax, people have to know about transmoggit first :) And the truth is, depending on your market and your brand, 60% to 100% of your visitors will come from search engines. Sure, after a while, you'll start to get referrals, but how did the person who linked to you found the page? Using search engines.

Don't see SEO as a way to trick the search engines ;) I know there's a lot of bad karma around its practices, but if you think that by applying SEO to your pages, you're just making easier for people to find your content, then you'll be happy to do it.

I don't know if you can ask around EA for its website statistics. I am pretty sure you'll see that >75% of its visitors come from search engines, even on obvious cases People type the domain name on search engines, for fsck's sake. Or what could actually just be the domain name if they followed with .com (searching for Youtube to go to... youtube.com).

There's actually some very good explanations for this behaviour, for example if I want to see the webpage for the Dead Space game, I don't have to guess if it is deadspace.com, deadspacegame.com, deadspace.ea.com, deadspace.games.ea.com, etc... Typing "dead space game" on Google is 100% more effective.

I am talking too much :) And I don't want to complicate things further to you. But just make it easier for people to find the webpages :)