Delimiter

[mat_bastian]

Is a colon ":" a delimiter in the eyes of Google? If it is, would there be any negative consequence to setting up a page title like so;

:::keyword:keyword:::

[Mohamed_E]

When in doubt do an experiment!

A search for :::keyword1::keyword2::: produced perefctly reasonable results, but only about 85,000 of them.

Searching for keyword1 keyword2 gave me 1,550,000 results.

So I suspected that the colons might, in some way, be tying the keywords together. This led me to search for "keyword1 keyword2" and it gave the same number of results as the first search.

So the colon is not acting exactly like a space, but it is separating them.

[xcandyman]

Just done a little bit of research on this and have come to this.

keyword1:keyword2 - shows exactly the same results as "keyword1 keyword2"

Also works like:

:keyword1 keyword2
keyword1/keyword2
keyword1.keyword2
keyword1@keyword2
keyword1=keyword2

However keyword1-keyword2 has different results from keyword1 keyword2 and :keyword1 keyword2

and keyword1¦keyword2 is very very confusing. I can't really explain you have to try it yourself.

keyword1*keyword2 displays same pages but in different order (* must be a filter of some sort.

Anyone care to explain?

Steve

[peewhy]

Many moons ago, I can't remember which search engines ruled thr roost - Google wasn't even born and compuserve emails were totally numeric ... just to give an indication of time warp!

Hyphen was minus and it asked the search to deduct that keyword from the results.

So, lets say your are searching for a UK county but not Yorkshire or Lancashire - it would go like this;

UK counties - yorkshire - lancashire.

Of course it doesn't work like that anymore, but I wonder if there was a relationship.

Sorry for showing my age;)

[xcandyman]

I think I figured out what keyword1*keyword2 means!

The SERPS seem to big giving pages with at least word seperating keyword1 keyword2 a boost in the rankings.

So * must meen a wildcard word!

Anyone back me up on this?

Steve