Ampersands & Google Wierdness
Posted by: Greg Bulmash in Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts
If you're studying up on SEO, you'll find that one of the primary recommendations is to validate your HTML, and this is so Google can understand it. This is all well and good when it comes to your HTML tags, but what about HTML entities?
HTML entities are special codes for special characters like the copyright symbol (©) and unlike tags, they're not bracketed. If you want to insert a copyright symbol, you use © in your body text. On the other hand, if you wanted to make it bold, you'd have to put bracketed tags around it like so: <b>©</b> (©).
You start your entity codes with an ampersand (&) and then follow it with an abbreviation, decimal code, or hexadecimal code for the special character, and then you end with a semicolon. And because of the ampersand's special role in this, it is supposed to be written in your HTML as &, or under newer recommendations &. And there is good reason for this. I've seen scripts break because an & was misinterpreted. Thus, if you have an ampersand all by its lonesome in a page, some validators are going to tell you that's an error and that your HTML won't validate until you correct it.
So, & or & is better than plain old &. But when someone types in that plain old & in a search query, will Google treat & or & equally? It seems not.
I recently wrote a blog post about a job recruiting letter being sent out by a company that calls itself "Robert D. Sell & Associates". If you Google "Robert D. Sell" at the moment, my page is the #1 result. If you Google "Robert D. Sell & Associates" my page is the number one result again. But if you Google "Robert D. Sell & Associates" with just the plain ampersand, the top result is for a real estate agency by the name of Robert D. Smith & Associates. If you Google ""Robert D. Sell & Associates" the results are the same as if you used a plain old ampersand.
Now, initially, I assumed it was because Wordpress, my blogging engine, had replaced my plain old ampersands with & (when I'm typing plain text in the blog editor, I don't usually think to do &, but just do the &) while Robert D. Smith was using plain ampersands, so it actually met the requirements of the search term ("Robert D. [blank] & Associates" with the "sell" later in the page). It didn't. Wordpress was using & and Smith was using &.
My page title had a phrase that meets the search term more precisely, but Google is treating the & ampersand and the & ampersand differently, so that when the search term includes a plain & Google favors the page using &, despite it being a less precise match, but favors my page when the search term includes && though I'm using &.
So, if I encode the ampersand to better match how it's appearing on my page (or don't encode it at all), the real estate agent with the different last name ends up as the top search result. But if I encode the ampersand the way the real estate agent uses it, then my page comes up as the top search result.
Odd. It seems that if you're really SEO'ing down to the dots on the I's, you're going to want to use & instead of & because Google seems to prefer the older ampersand... for now.
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