topic Re: Punctuation in Titles in Create Products

Punctuation in Titles

Caprice — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 23:52:34 GMT

What effect, if any, does punctuation have in titles? For example - commas, dashes, etc. Use, or best to leave out? I guess I'm asking if it confuses the algorithm?

Re: Punctuation in Titles

shellifitz — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 02:28:49 GMT

One thing I have noticed and I am not sure if it still happens but if you add quotation marks, apostropies and sometimes ampersands, these will mess up the way the text is rendered on links you post. It used to happen alot in the old show me forums and also sometimes when I used to post to Twitter. I haven't noticed them for a while so maybe Z techs fixed whatever the problem was.

Re: Punctuation in Titles

Windy — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 03:15:31 GMT

I just recently searched for a product in the Zazzle marketplace which has a special character in the title. This product did not come up in the Zazzle search. I removed the character and then the product came up in the search. It was this character, not sure what the name is: |

Re: Punctuation in Titles

shellifitz — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 03:21:28 GMT

Interesting... 🤔

Re: Punctuation in Titles

mylittleeden — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 06:11:40 GMT

As others here have said, overtime I have found the & can turn to text 'ampersands' or similar and that really messes things up. I used to use special characters alot. Whilst I have no idea if they affect the searches or algorithms. I now have a policy of keeping them out just to be sure and to stop any unwanted text errors. The & , : and " " have been just a frustration and I don't think it helped sales at all.

As the saying goes if in doubt leave it out! 😃 Well I do now it is easier anyway.

Re: Punctuation in Titles

WittyBetty — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 16:11:30 GMT

Punctuation in titles is pretty much useless as titles are meant for search engines primarily and search engines tend to ignore punctuation. Search requests like "black & white" can be contracted to "black white" and search results won't differ a lot. So there is no actual need to include an extra character in a title.

Re: Punctuation in Titles

Caprice — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 17:05:50 GMT

Interesting. If they don't confuse the algorithms and are ignored - maybe ok/helpful to use in titles. Punctuation can be helpful to humans. After all, there's a difference between:

Let's eat, Grandma! pillow and a

Let's eat Grandma pillow.

Re: Punctuation in Titles

shellifitz — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 03:18:22 GMT

But Google would probably eat grandma either way 😅

Re: Punctuation in Titles

PAZP — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 13:35:01 GMT

😂🤣

Re: Punctuation in Titles

PAZP — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 13:36:30 GMT

Interesting. I used to use those and need to remove more of them as I catch them in my titles.

Re: Punctuation in Titles

ColsCreations — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 02:47:42 GMT

It's referred to as the pipe and it's one of the characters Google ignores. Google actually ignores most characters except for when it's smart enough to know it's essential to what you're searching for, like say "c++" if you're looking for stuff related to that programming language. Google also ignores "stop words". You can look up a list of them but basically they are common words that add no value to the search, like and/in/on etc. The general advice is to always write for humans first, SEO second, so you don't want just a string of unpunctuated keywords or keywords separated by a pipe for better human readability. But if you know that Google ignores most punctuation, special characters, and stop words, you can write content in human-speak that still incorporates long-tail phrases if you were to cross-out all the parts Google doesn't recognize. And since Google doesn't care about grammar or periods, the words at the end of a human-speak sentence connect to the words at the beginning of the next sentence, creating long-tail phrases same as if you made them intentionally. And this is one thing I know for sure is the same with Zazzle's search.

We tend to think of our tags as 10 tags of 5 word each and try to do the best we can making long-tail/exact phrases out of 5 words. But Z see's it as one long unbroken string of 50 words. So for simple example if you wrote these tags

bright yellow, sunflower, field of wild flowers, illustration by windy

then "yellow sunflower", "sunflower field", and "flower illustration"

also become long-tail/exact phrases. Coming up with tags is time-consuming enough as it is but if you go the extra mile to arrange them in an order that creates more long-tails likely to be searched you can get more bang for your buck out of your allotted tag words.

Back to punctuation. I name all my designs and use that [Design Name] in brackets in my product titles, and then use that design name for my collections. One of my design names had an ampersand in it ("Fire & Ice"). As far as I know that didn't effect search, but because & is a reserved character in coding, it caused some hiccups. Using the share code to post something to the forums, the entity name (&) would show instead of the symbol. Also that & posed an issue for pulling the collection in Nifty, I remember talking to Mark about it but it was along time ago so I don't remember (sorry, Mark!) if he created a work-around for that or not as my solution was just to do away with the & and use and instead. Oh, and as far as I've been able to tell, the brackets in my titles's haven't effected searching either .

@Windy

Re: Punctuation in Titles

Windy — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 20:29:53 GMT

I continue to find invaluable your notation about this "order of operations" thing involving tags in particular. You explained that in detail in the Old Forums and I completely changed how I do tagging once I understood.