Using punctuation in Google search results is the reason for constant misunderstanding and rumors. Meaningful punctuation, like the “#” in C#, hyphens and apostrophes can have a direct effect on how Google serves results, and ranks your site.
I have summarized both the confirmed data and webmasters’ observations I’ve been coming across in the table below:
| Not ignored | “Meaningful” punctuation | C++ and C# | |
| Boolean operators | exact match | “free online encyclopedia” | |
| “exclude” the term (no space before the word it is related with) – don’t confuse with hyphen | dvd -player | ||
| “add” the term (no space) | advanced +search | ||
| Money signs | DVD player $400 | ||
| Underscore symbol (treated as a letter) | quick_sort | ||
| Advanced operators / shortcuts | colon between two words (no spaces) | site:google.com | |
| Synonym search | ~apple | ||
| Partially ignored / undefined | Hyphen | The mixture of hyphenated, single-word and two-word spelling variations [air-condition] and [air condition] | |
| Apostrophe | matts and matt’s and matts’ | ||
| Ignored | All the rest | Compare: apple, windows and apple windows and apple: windows and apple=windows | |
As always, very interesting information.
Thank you Ann.
Great information – would like to see a similar explanation for plural versus singular searches. There is a difference but it’s not a clear difference.
Any insight into how Google treats the ampersand? It seems to read them both as the same but returns different results for (q and a) vs. (q & a).
On a related topic, one thing I haven’t been able to find elsewhere is how the engines treat special characters in URLs. For instance: tildes, umlauts, etc. Has anyone seen any information on this?
: <— Colon
; <— Semicolon
Colons are generally used to signify that a list follows; semicolons are used to connect two individually complete sentences into a single thought.
Great post. It’s information like this that helps to understand what not to do. I like how it’s understandable in a very clear and concise table, great way of displaying information. All the other comments are informative too. Excellent.
@Ryan, good question! Unfortunately I have no answer yet, but I’ll do my homework :)
I used to see this question pop up from time to time, e.g.:
http://www.brainhandles.com/techno-thoughts/ampersands-google-wierdness
Does anyone have any idea?
@niceguyted, thanks for the catch!
It’s long time since they have changed the algo on using these Punctuation’s. Also there has been some discussion going on this some times back. But while seeing @ the others it’s very sad :(((((((
thanks for the post
Does anyone have any experience of google’s treatment of apostophes? As far as I can tell, if you do an intitle search for the word I’m (ie intitle:I’m), then Google won’t return results where the word I’m is rendered as I & #039; m in the HTML (Extra spaces added to avoid code getting changed to apostrophe).
As wordpress etc change the ‘ to its ASCII code like this, this stops pages ranking well for searches that include the words I’m.
Does anyone have any experience of this?!? (Here’s an example: this search: http://bit.ly/OeGgT doesn’t return this: http://bit.ly/4jZxlo/)