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  4. Soft Hyphenation: Influence on Search Engines

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Soft Hyphenation: Influence on Search Engines

Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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  • zeepartner
    zeepartner last edited by Dec 19, 2011, 12:47 PM

    Does anyone have experience on soft hyphenation and its effects on rankings?

    We are planning to use  ­ in our company blog to improve the layout. Currently, every word above 4 syllable will be soft hyphenated.
    This seems to render okay in all browsers, but it might be a problem with IE9...

    In HTML 5, the "­" soft hyphenation seems to be replaced with the <wbr> Tag (http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_wbr.asp) and i don't find anything else about soft-hyphenation in the specs.

    Any experiences or opinions about this? Do you think it affects rankings if there are a lot of soft hyphens in the text?

    Does it still make sense to use ­ or would you switch to <wbr> already?

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • zeepartner
      zeepartner @firstconversion last edited by Dec 30, 2011, 8:16 AM Dec 30, 2011, 8:16 AM

      Hi Stephen

      Thanks for your thoughts. Personally I don't think we need this but people from corporate communication somehow got stuck on this idea. See if I can scare them out of it by mentioning load time...

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • firstconversion
        firstconversion last edited by Dec 29, 2011, 8:42 PM Dec 29, 2011, 8:42 PM

        Whew, had to go google that one - soft hyphenation for the lulz! No, I would expect no effect, or no measurable effect. As a standard part of grammar so I would expect search engines to deal with this as natural language

        btw, I have seen this in action in the past and its made the text look worse, been an unnecessary extra load & gone wrong quite a bit, requiring troubleshooting and maintenance (was from a plugin tho)

        You sure you need this?

        zeepartner 1 Reply Last reply Dec 30, 2011, 8:16 AM Reply Quote 0
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