Using “ ” to avoid unwanted log entries

Does " " work for this and if so can you be penalized for abusing it.

[gmoney]

I was reading through a thread [webmasterworld.com] about pages getting hits from unwanted queries and was curious about the following comment.

”I think I would try wrapping the "terrible" words in non-breaking spaces, e.g.  sexy ”. - KeyMaster

Has anybody tried this before and does it work. Would blue widgets be seen by Google as one big word? If not, then how does Google interpret it?

Also, does Google look down on this as a form of deception like it does by using “$” within words in place of “S”? I am wondering because I can think of a couple of ways that some people could abuse the use   if it were to lump words together. It could be used to artificially increase your keyword density or to hide duplicate content etc.

Sometimes I want to use certain keywords as examples, like blue widgets, even though my pages are not relevant to blue widgets. I don’t want to waste the searchers time on viewing my page that is irrelevant to the keyword and I don’t want to waste my time when combing through my log files. Is   the answer? Also, will Google penalize sites for abusing  ?

[hstyri]

That's a good question. It would be nice to know how Google indexing and search handles special characters like ­ (soft hyphen) as well, not to forget non-breaking hyphen.

[Key_Master]

It does work.

Cut & paste search URL into address bar of browser for link to work.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=%26nbsp%3Bsexy%26nbsp%3B>

Try to search a little deeper for keywords listed on the page that pops up in the search results and Google comes up dry:

[google.com...]

Remove the word "Sexy" and the listing pops back up:

[google.com...]

hehe! ;)

I don't think you would be penalized for it, you just won't get much traffic for those keywords (which is what you want).

[edit]Repaired link[/edit]

[edited by: Key_Master at 10:09 pm (utc) on Sep. 23, 2002]

[sw8296]

That's not what I want! My main keyword is a person's name, so throughout my site I've got &nbsp; between the parts of his name to stop it breaking across lines.

It's a new site though, so I think I'll wait until the update to see how Google handles it.

[Napoleon]

The concept of Google penalising sites for using valid HTML like &nbsp; is frankly a nonsense.

They are not the web design police. The day they start deciding which web page parameters and commands are allowed/not-allowed will be a very sad one indeed.

I don't think you have a problem. I use &nbsp; and many other similar devices for a variety of valid purposes and have never had a problem.

[gmoney]

http://www.google.com/search?q=egocentric+Evokation+Dwarf - Key_Master

If I followed this example correctly then the page you are referring to actually has the &nbsp; visible when looking at it with my browser. The source code is not &nbsp;Sexy&nbsp; but rather &amp;nbsp;Sexy&amp;nbsp;".

It appears that Google resolves &amp; into & and thus allows the search for &nbsp;sexy&nbsp; to return the page containing &amp;nbsp;Sexy&amp;nbsp;. Based on this example I conclude that a source code of “blue&nbsp;widgets” will be viewed by Google as just “blue widgets”.

If the conclusion in the above paragraph is correct then the questions in the title and description of this thread have been answered: The &nbsp; can’t be used to stop unwanted log entries and there is no way anybody can abuse this and thus there is no reason for Google to penalize sites.

Well, I am still looking for a way to avoid unwanted log entries for keywords. Does anybody have any other ideas. Perhaps somebody else can make a better case for &nbsp; because I have given up hope for using it to stop unwanted log entries.

[Key_Master]

Never mind...

[gmoney]

Is it “Never mind” because I do not understand your example

or

“Never mind” because you didn’t notice that &nbsp; actually appeared when viewed in a browser because the webmaster had some coding issues.

If it is the first one then I would really appreciate a clarification.

[Helpmebe1]

I have plenty of &nbsp in my pages.. I sure the heck hope this dosent cause any negative effects.. originally my pages were designed in frontpage and then I cut and copied alot of the coding... I have since then manually done alot of adjustments but still have alot of tis &nbsp.. if this can cause harm.. then please........... let me know.. but like it was said.. I dont think it can...

[Key_Master]

It's never mind because you can't search for an un-modified non-breaking space which makes searching for an example nearly impossible. And who says it has to be &nbsp; anyhow? &#160; is also a non-breaking space and Google seems to completely ignore it. Or (hard to find an example) you could character code the entire word you're trying to hide.

But if you really want to be on the safe side, don't use keywords that do not relate to the content of your site. If you must use them, disallow spiders from indexing that page via robots.txt

[gmoney]

I might try Key_Master’s suggestion and character code an entire word just to see how Google handles it. However, I am now pretty sure that, similar to browsers, Google will resolve the character codes into the actual characters that make up the word and then base its rankings on the word and not the character codes. It would be consistent with Google’s philosophy of wanting to base relevance on what is seen by the searcher (i.e. they don’t care about meta keywords/descriptions, they don’t like text the same color as the background, they don’t like cloaking, etc.).

Key_Master’s suggestion about using robots.txt is a good one for many cases where you want to avoid unwanted log entries, but in my case there is plenty of other relevant content on the page for keywords that I do want referrals from. I think I will borrow the underscore in Key_Master’s member name and write my examples in the form of blue_widgets. That ought to cut back on unwanted log entries as well as highlight that it is just an example:)

[Hagstrom]

It would be nice to know how Google indexing and search handles special characters like &shy; (soft hyphen

It would seem that Google doesn't handle the soft hyphen very well.

http://www.google.com/search?q=floccinaucinihilipilification

returns 974 hits whereas

http://www.google.com/search?q=floc%ADci%ADnau%ADci%ADni%ADhil%ADi%ADpil%ADi%ADfi%ADca%ADtion

and

http://www.google.com/search?q=floc+ci+nau+ci+ni+hil+i+pil+i+fi+ca+tion

only finds 6 pages. Apparently Google treats every syllable as a separate word.

Too bad. Scandinavian words tend to be quite long and it would be nice to be able to hyphenate them without loosing any keywords in Google.

[hstyri]

Well, I am still looking for a way to avoid unwanted log entries for keywords.

Well, have you tried zero width space? Like t&#8203;h&#8203;i&#8203;s (that's unicode)?

[gmoney]

That’s a good idea hstyri . . . instead of joining words, you divide them. I believe that breaking up unwanted keyw&#8203;ords in that manner would pretty much eliminate unwanted traffic (i.e. nobody searches for "keyw ords"). However, my browser represents “&#8203;” as a big box. I’ll have to look into this further. Anyway, along the lines of your idea I might explore the soft hyphen (&#173;) and the zero width non breaking space (&#65279;). Maybe Hagstrom’s problem with soft hyphens will be my solution:)

Anyway, assuming one of the techniques above can be successfully implemented in a way to break up “blue wi&#8203;dgits”, then is there any risk of upsetting Google by feeding Googlebot the equivalent of “blue wi dgits” and feeding the people “blue widgets”? I know that it seems like a silly concern but the technique might be able to be abused by somebody trying to hide duplicate content or something.

[sw8296]

What about putting...

<span style="font-size:1px">.</span>

...in the middle of the keyword you want to obscure? Would the . be small enough so that visitors would not notice it?

edit: I've just tested it and it looks OK to me. Drawback is that it obviously needs a CSS capable browser.

[ikbenhet1]

Does &nbsp; work?
i think so.

I like this:

hide keyword in normal text
<script>document.write('thahiddenkeyword');</script>

hide keyword in a link
<a href="it works">Keywords<script>document.write('thahiddenkeyword');</script></a>

[hstyri]

Maybe Hagstrom’s problem with soft hyphens will be my solution:)

Hopefully not, non-english webmasters will probably ask Google to handle soft hyphens properly until they comply. (Some of us will probably ask for compliance with other unicode stuff as well ;))

zero width non breaking space

You're right, I forgot the breakability of the zero width space. Please note that there are some issues related to the zero width non-breaking space and a word joiner would probably be more appropriate.