Comments on: How Google Treats Punctuation

By: malcolm coles

malcolm coles — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:44:03 +0000

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/)

By: Scott @ scottydonald.com

Scott @ scottydonald.com — Fri, 08 May 2009 07:45:33 +0000

thanks for the post

By: CAP Digisoft Solutions Inc.

CAP Digisoft Solutions Inc. — Thu, 07 May 2009 11:35:46 +0000

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 :(((((((

By: Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty — Sun, 03 May 2009 13:27:51 +0000

@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!

By: Jenny

Jenny — Fri, 01 May 2009 08:12:36 +0000

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.

By: niceguyted

niceguyted — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:43:08 +0000

: <— 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.

By: mevans05

mevans05 — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:38:08 +0000

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?

By: Ryan Smith

Ryan Smith — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:25:14 +0000

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).

By: art jewelry

art jewelry — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:59:24 +0000

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.

By: John

John — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 01:48:26 +0000

As always, very interesting information.
Thank you Ann.