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Punctuation: Grandpa’s Life May Depend on It … But Does It Matter to the Search engines?
Who cares about punctuation, anyway? Isn’t it just the province of musty old grammarians languishing in some ivory tower? Well, there are some situations where punctuation actually does make a difference. Consider these two sentences:
- “Let’s eat, grandpa!”
- “Let’s eat grandpa!”
Obviously, that extra comma does potentially matter to grandpa. Still, this kind of situation is not what our customers in New York and New Jersey have in mind when they ask our web designers if punctuation makes any difference on websites.
Google announces it’s paying attention
Google actually made an announcement last month that represented a change in practice in the way its search engine treats punctuation marks. Going forward, it said that it would update its indexing and display results for punctuation marks including exclamation points (!), hash signs (#) and ampersands (&). It’s unclear to us as web designers what’s to be gained by this action, but it aroused our curiosity enough to run a few checks. We searched Google on the single character “;” and here’s what popped up: a Wikipedia article on semicolons, a tutorial on “How to use the semicolon,” and a discussion of commas versus semicolons. Fascinating stuff to somebody, no doubt, but of little utility to our NJ web developers. (more…)
d phrases. But how good a job are they actually doing?
In recent years, the amount of spam appearing on the web has increased substantially – there’s no doubt that it is becoming a problem for many users. It’s difficult to find the information that you need, without wading through copious amounts of ‘filler’ and web junk. Major search engines, such as Google, continually strive to resolve this ongoing issue. However, it’s very interesting to note that Google’s AdSense program has been one of the main catalysts in actually increasing the amount of content spam on the web.
