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Compound Words [webster.commnet.edu]
Dashes & Hyphens [oaklandcc.edu]
Pulled out of thin air, look at the structure and meaning of these cobbled together fragmented sentences:
Doing your part - time to make a commitment.
Doing your part-time to make a commitment.
In the first, there's no doubt part and time are two separate words. With the second, it's a compound word which in a sense is one word. See the difference in phrasing and how it can change the meaning?
Widgets: Dangerous source of...
Had I done it as:
Widgets - Dangerous source of...
This would have not made it any clearer for the searcher, and used up one more space in the title. Google only displays in the SERPs the first so many characters in the page title. And, quite possibly ignores beyond that for the algo.
(don't fall out with me here ; )
..it's discussing grammar for humans ( and American English ones at that )and we all know that search engine spiders don't read like humans ..in spite of what google et al would like us to beleive...
I use hyphens as "separators" in title bar with no surrounding space ..all search engines spider these as "word followed by unrelated second word" ..maybe they have lexicons to guide them as to common compound words and so most of the time would pick up on your part-time ..as a "known compound word" ...
But as someone posted here the other day by taking out the hyphens from "london-stocks-exchange" ..you get a "tranny site" in #1 spot ..so search engines think simple and count a hyphen as a "divider" not a "linker" symbol ..
added since rfgxm1
..problem is that colon and hyhpen do not look the same in title bar as they are posted here on page ...here if you do colon:colon you can distinguish the words by eye however colon-colon is easier to read ( question of visual accutence or acutence or whatever the spelling is ..the ability to distinguish as descreet small points ) ...unless you have 20-20 vision ...hyphen separators are much easier than colons and after just 10 minutes looking at a screen and white letters reversed out of dark blue as in title bars (..which is much harder than black on white like in "body" here atWebmasterWorld )your eyes are no longer functioning at 20-20 ...
s'cuse spelling "comme d'ab"
[edited by: Leosghost at 6:33 pm (utc) on June 28, 2004]
bathos;)
well-trained magician's assistant
I'm sure Google's algorithm would agree
my #1's ..and the #1 positions of many others prove otherwise
As to your browser settings colors etc etc ..I'm referring to "joe six pack" ..who doesn't "tweak" he uses it "outta da box"...
I know what rfdgxm1 wrote ..read me again and you'll get it ...you are stating the case for "correct" ...I'm putting forward "real world" ...
Your choice wether you want to apply it ...
But it pays to bear in mind that very few of us are selling to holders of English degrees with secondary qualifications in computer sciences ....
s'cuse spelling "comme d'ab"
Have you actually tried the "london-stocks-exchange" as query? Guess what turns out in #1 spot - YOUR recent post above! :-) And the other SERPS on the first page look rather respecteable as wel...
[5 minutes later]
OK, now I read the thing about TAKING OUT the hyphens... Still, the results are all respecteable and on-topic. But completely different from the first query...
And, quite possibly ignores beyond that for the algo.
In my experience, they don't ignore beyond the 62-63 characters for the algo. I will sometimes let titles run to 70 characters, and Google indexes them just fine. It may or may not be important, though, whether it's OK that surfers don't see beyond the cutoff.
If you're targeting a phrase that's split in the title, the proximity between the words in the split title phrase is important. I've seen titles where the second word in title was beyond the 62 character limit, and everything was fine, but when I added an extra modifier in between, my rankings disappeared.
The above depends a lot also on how competitive the phrase is, of course, what's on your page, and what's in your inbound links. But Google will go beyond 63...
Whether the extra spaces around the hyphen will stretch proximity too much is doubtful, but in a two-million horse race, a couple of space might conceivably shade a photo-finish the wrong way. I always use the spaces.
Back to the repeated word, probably you don't want to repeat the word next to itself, as in...
Blue Widgets - Widgets For All Occasions
I've never gotten a good answer on whether, if I'm targeting both Red Widgets and Blue Widgets, I'm better off going with ...
Red and Blue Widgets
or with...
Red Widgets and Blue Widgets
Exactly my sentiments. Pardon for sounding like a broken record, but much as I dearly love them and always will, Google is not the only crap game in town.
In fact I've been seriously pondering this whole thing, and at this point I think I owe cabbie a cuppa if we ever chance to meet up.
'corse I once was a copywriter ( print media spammer ).
And at the moment, Yahoo definitely is a significant player. Not as big as Google, for sure. OTOH, they aren't like Wisenut where you could vanish from the SERPs there and not even notice it from the logs.