Punctuation marks

[Farhan]

Do punctuation marks such as (, ! ? .) etc do stop the crawler from reading the actual keyword if the marks are present just after the word, and as we know that Google for example does not stems words.

for example if my keyword was shoes, would the crawler read the keyword in this sectence

great shoes!!! at affordable prices.

[Mel]

Great Question Farhan

and one that I do not have the sure answer for (yet).

We do know that many spiders are not able to read some puctiation marks in URLs, but this is a different case.

[ihelpyou]

Yes she does. These forums have produced many a different kind of referral and search. As such, I have seen many times when the keyword is next to a question mark or other characters. Here is one example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=spamming+icq&hl=en&start=0&sa=N

Think it's the 6th or 7th listing.

[Mel]

Hi Farhan:

found the following but still looking fro more definitive answers:

In order to shorten response time, the search engine ignores small and common words that appear frequently in the text and titles of documents. Those words include a, an, and, as, at, be, if, into, it, of, on, or, the, to, etc. Search engines also ignore some punctuation marks, including period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,). The search engine will recognize some characters if they are enclosed in quotation marks. You can use the following: "&", "|", "^", "#", "@", "$", "(", and ")".
but this still does not answer the exclaimation point question.

[Farhan]

Hi Mel,
Did you checked the SRP of what Doug has posted here. Does it gives the clarity that we can use punctuation marks such as ( ! , ? ) with keywords?

[Mel]

Hi Farhan:

I cannot find anything definitive on the use of other punctuation marks, but trying some searches on Google:

shoes
shoes!!!
shoes???
shoes...
shoes,,,
shoes ;;;
shoes:::

all return the same results, so I think it is safe to assume that Google will ignore all puctuation marks.

I would suggest that you check results in other engines you are interested in to see how they handle punctuation marks.

[pageoneresults]

Just to be on the safe side, I've always kept punctuation marks out of hyperlinks. When I do use them, I make sure that they are not part of the link, even periods!