html coding question...

[MsSearch]

This may be an insignificant factor but i'm curious...

I have a designer who uses & egrave ; (as opposed to just using an 'e' ) in his coding (for a U.S. site where most people will not have 'e grave accent' on their keyboards) as well as using "& #146;" , "& #147;" , "& #148;" and many others.
(take out the spaces between the & #)

How do the search engine spiders read this? Does it affect rankings for keyword searches?

An example: women's vs. women& #146;s (take out the space between the & #)
Do spiders see both of these as women's?

Just a thought that crossed my mind...

[ihelpyou]

Very good question!

I think the anwer is yes, they can read it.

[Advisor]

Try running the page with it coded that way through a lynx browser and see what it shows. That will probably give you your answer!

There's one here you can use: http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html

My guess is that it probably can read it correctly, but who knows!

Good luck!

Jill

[MsSearch]

Wow...that was a neat little test.

It displayed the 'e grave accent' properly but not the "& #146;" , "& #147;" , "& #148;" . Those later 3 were displayed just as they are in the html code.

Thanx WebWhiz

[JuniorHarris]

I think it really depends on the engine itself as to whether it would read the special characters. Personally I would restrict usage, unless necessary. For example, use the regular apostrophe where needed...and only Unicode those characters which require umlauts or the such.

This is just my gut feel, but I'm not sure engines will translate these. After all, a great webmaster trick is to Unicode email addresses to prevent email harvester spiders from being able to read/find the address.

You will be your best judge, and you may want to experiment with this. If you have terms which appear more then once, you may try coding them both ways and analyze the results once the engine has indexed the pages. Then you will be an expert on the subject, and can report back to us!~;)