We posted this in 2006, almost exactly two years ago. It’s a chance for us to re-visit the SEO trends of the past and determine what changes in the industry have taken place since. Before one of the web sites we used to work on had a regular news feed. Searching for the post I noticed two years ago that the article was #1 for some cool keywords. Turns out upon closer inspection a special character–the ‘ wasn’t a ‘ but a ’ [the appropriate HTML code is ’]–was the aspect that ranked and not the normal apostrophe. Has anything changed today?

Special Characters No Longer Affect Googlebot

This is the first piece of evidence I’ve completed that shows special characters were NOT treated equally with Google. A ‘ is not the same as ’[’]. The difference is night and day. I took the same phrase search above with the regular apostrophe and wound up with these results.

October 2008, checking out a client’s French web site I notice that he had tons of special characters for the accented e’s and a’s. Uh oh, better double check in Google. I search both special characters as outlined in the HTML code, and the normal ‘output’ that visitors see. The bot sees the HTML and the users search without.

Result? Google can figure out special characters and will rank the web site appropriately for the correlating search terms. What I can’t say at this point is whether or not it has any affect on SEO (as in if opted for no special characters if that was slightly better than with special characters….) Will keep you posted.