Using the space escape character in text.

Any Google penalty associated with this.

[Broadway]

In the text of my pages, at times, I am using the escape character for a space between keywords so to force the page formatting of two and three word phrases.

Instead of: blue widgets

I am using: blue widgets

Can someone confirm for me that Google (and the Google Serps) see these two phrases as the same and using the escape character does not have an effect on my ranking for this two keyword phrase.

[g1smd]

I am not so sure that anyone outside of Google would possibly know anything about that.

Maybe you could tell us your experiences; as it is you that is running the experiment.

[rebelde]

If I understand this right, you want Google to see it as two words, and the browsers to see it as one word so it doesn't wrap? Even if it did work today, I couldn't be sure that Google wouldn't change it in the future.

If you are trying to keep it from wrapping, I would use "nowrap".

[Broadway]

I gone through a period where I haven't conscientiously reviewed my pages' rankings and tried to tweak on page factors so to help to maintain their rankings. Over the last year it seems I've lost some ground on some competative keywords.

So I have a situation where the page content has been fairly static, while I've lost ranking position. Over the last year I have tried to "improve" the linking text to each of my pages (making sure appropriate keywords are contained in each link).

Every page on my website contains an index linking to the first page of each of my topics. So this index would format properly at all screen resolutions I started using the "space" escape character ( ) so key word phrases would stay on the same line and not be split up (so I got the appearance I wanted for the index).

Considering the nuances associated with using hyphens and undescores in URL's, maybe using   between keywords in text isn't a good idea.

I guess I'll change things where the   isn't used and see if it seems I get a ranking boost.

[Broadway]

The server was slow, I ended up posting my message twice.

[edited by: Broadway at 2:31 pm (utc) on May 15, 2007]

[Broadway]

rebelde,
Actually I was unfamiliar with the NOWRAP attribute. My index isn't in a table so it's not immediately convenient to use it.

Looking up NOWRAP lead me to the <NOBR> tag, which I was also unfamiliar with. I think I'll try it.

Thanks.

[g1smd]

Nooooo!

That tag is NON-standard.

Use CSS to do this.

[rainborick]

I may be missing the point here, but isn't this what &nbsp; is for? I use that as a non-breaking space character all the time and the search engines handle it just fine.