Do quotation marks in content effect SERPs?
-
Some of my art object products have words and phrases engraved on them. The words relate to the images on the product. In the product descriptions, I have been putting quotes around the entire list. Would I get better long tail results if I didn't use the quotation marks? In other words, do the quotes make everything between them an exact match phrase?
For example:
Current product description:
The worlds around the edge of the lazy susan read, "Explore nature. Dream big. Take time to smell the flowers. Enjoy the changing seasons. Seize the day. Relish the night. Live life to the fullest."Thank you for helping with this, all comments on how to present this kind of content are welcomed-
Stephen
-
Hi there,
You’re fine to have your product description quoting the text around the side of the product, but if you were to change it to something like this without quotes:
The words around the edge of the lazy susan read: Explore nature. Dream big. Take time to smell the flowers. Enjoy the changing seasons. Seize the day. Relish the night. Live life to the fullest.
…that would have the exact same SEO value as the existing description. Quotes are only counted as exact match keywords when searching in Google (and most other search engines), but don’t actually affect the way the page is seen by Google. The same way that using bold and italics to emphasise your keywords would not directly influence rank (but make your content more easily digestible, earning it more links and indirectly affecting rank), your quotes are also used to enhance human readability – but either would be fine.
Take a real world example: I pulled a page from my history which included a quote, “favor composition over inheritance” - (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/65179/where-does-this-concept-of-favor-composition-over-inheritance-come-from)
Take a look at the screenshot I took below (from an unclean browser, sorry) – or you can run a search yourself – and we still see Wikipedia at the top, with its DA 100 (and no quotes); we see stackoverflow rising above stackexchange, with a higher DA; one result has more links than the stackexchange page, one has fewer. But they still perform better.
The stackexchange page with 5 counts of “favor composition over inheritance" (with quotes) is still outranked by the others.
- The 3<sup>rd</sup> result uses the keyword 6 times, twice in quotes.
- The 2<sup>nd</sup> result uses the keyword once without quotes.
- The 1<sup>st</sup> Wikipedia result uses the term once without quotes and still ranks #1 due to its other (better) metrics.
There are a number of factors which could affect the position of these pages for this keyword, such as anchor text for links to those pages, partial match keywords in the text and other ranking factors which I did not look into – but hopefully it will give you a real example of quotation marks not directly affecting the value of a keyword in Google’s eyes.
Write the descriptions the way you that sounds best to you – and optimise them for human readability, as quotes versus no quotes doesn’t make much of a difference.
Hope that helps,
Tom
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to deal with this duplicate content
Hello our websites offers prayer times in the US and UK. The problem is that we have nearby towns where the prayer times are the same and the pages (exp : https://prayer-times.us/prayer-times-lake-michigan-12258-en and https://prayer-times.us/prayer-times-lake-12147-en) are in duplicate . Same issue for this page https://prayer-time.uk/prayer-times-wallsend-411-en How can we solve this problem
On-Page Optimization | | Zakirou0 -
Duplicate Content in Footers (Not as routine as it seems)
Hello there, I know that content in the footer of sites are safe from duplication penalisation; however, what if the footers where replicated across different subdomains? For instance, the footer was duplicated across: www.example.com blog.example.com blog2.example.com I don't see it as a big issue personally; however, outsourced "specialists" seem to think that this is causing duplication problems and therefore negatively affecting the ranking power of "lesser" subdomains i.e. not the www version, which is by far the strongest subdomain. Would be good to get some insight if anybody has any. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | SEONOW1230 -
Hi - How do you get rid of duplicate content that was accidentally created on a tag url? For example, when I published a new article, the content was duplicated on: /posts/tag/lead-generation/
the original article was created with: /posts/shippers-looking-for-freight-brokers/ How can I fix this so a new URL is not created every time I add a tag to a new posting?
On-Page Optimization | | treetopgrowthstrategy0 -
Does hreflang restrain my site from being penalized for duplicated content?
I am curently setting up a travel agency website. This site is going to be targeting both american and mexican costumers. I will be working with an /es subdirectory. Would hreflang, besides showing the matching language version in the SERP´s, restrain my site translated content (wich is pretty much the same) from being penalized fro duplicated content? Do I have to implement relcannonical? Thank ypu in advanced for any help you can provide.
On-Page Optimization | | kpi3600 -
Fading in content above the fold on window load
Hi, We'd like to render a font stack from Typekit and paint a large cover image above the fold of our homepage after document completion. Since asynchronously loading anything generally looks choppy, we fade in the affected elements when it's done. Sure, it gives a much smoother feeling and fast load times, but I have a concern about SEO. While Typekit loads, h1, h2 and the page's leading paragraph are sent down the wire with an invisible style (but still technically exist as static html). Even though they appear to a user only milliseconds later, I'm concerned that a search engine's initial request is met with a page whose best descriptive assets are marked as invisible. Both UX and SEO have high value to our business model, so we're asking for some perspective to make the right kind of trade off. Our site has a high domain authority compared to our competition, and sales keyword competition is high. Will this UX improvement damage our On-Page SEO? If so and purely from an SEO perspective, roughly how serious will the impact be? We're eager to hear any advice or comments on this. Thanks a lot.
On-Page Optimization | | noyelling0 -
Multilingual site with untranslated content
We are developing a site that will have several languages. There will be several thousand pages, the default language will be English. Several sections of the site will not be translated at first, so the main content will be in English but navigation/boilerplate will be translated. We have hreflang alternate tags set up for each individual page pointing to each of the other languages, eg in the English version we have: etc In the spanish version, we would point to the french version and the english version etc. My question is, is this sufficient to avoid a duplicate content penalty for google for the untranslated pages? I am aware that from a user perspective, having untranslated content is bad, but in this case it is unavoidable at first.
On-Page Optimization | | jorgeapartime0 -
Duplicate Content for Spanish & English Product
Hi There, Our company provides training courses and I am looking to provide the Spanish version of a course that we already provide in English. As it is an e-commerce site, our landing page for the English version gives the full description of the course and all related details. Once the course is purchased, a flash based course launches within a player window and the student begins the course. For the Spanish version of the course, my target customers are English speaking supervisors purchasing the course for their Spanish speaking workers. So the landing page will still be in English (just like the English version of the course) with the same basic description, with the only content differences on that page being the inclusion of the fact that this course is in Spanish and a few details around that. The majority of the content on these two separate landing pages will be exactly the same, as the description for the overall course is the same, just that it's presented in a different language, so it needs to be 2 separate products. My fear is that Google will read this as duplicate content and I will be penalized for it. Is this a possibility or will Google know why I set it up this way and not penalize me? If that is a possibility, how should I go about doing this correctly? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | NiallTom0 -
What is the effect of too many internal links on a page?
Hi there! We have been doing a great effort during the last year but our main competitor is still above us in search rankings. Basically, the main differente remains now in the number of internal links, specially in our homepage. We have more than 200 and they only have around 100, so I think we are wasting too much link power among some irrelevant pages. What could be the effect of this?
On-Page Optimization | | bodaclick0