Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do quotation marks in content effect SERPs?
-
Some of my art object products have words and phrases engraved on them. The words relate to the images on the product. In the product descriptions, I have been putting quotes around the entire list. Would I get better long tail results if I didn't use the quotation marks? In other words, do the quotes make everything between them an exact match phrase?
For example:
Current product description:
The worlds around the edge of the lazy susan read, "Explore nature. Dream big. Take time to smell the flowers. Enjoy the changing seasons. Seize the day. Relish the night. Live life to the fullest."Thank you for helping with this, all comments on how to present this kind of content are welcomed-
Stephen
-
Hi there,
You’re fine to have your product description quoting the text around the side of the product, but if you were to change it to something like this without quotes:
The words around the edge of the lazy susan read: Explore nature. Dream big. Take time to smell the flowers. Enjoy the changing seasons. Seize the day. Relish the night. Live life to the fullest.
…that would have the exact same SEO value as the existing description. Quotes are only counted as exact match keywords when searching in Google (and most other search engines), but don’t actually affect the way the page is seen by Google. The same way that using bold and italics to emphasise your keywords would not directly influence rank (but make your content more easily digestible, earning it more links and indirectly affecting rank), your quotes are also used to enhance human readability – but either would be fine.
Take a real world example: I pulled a page from my history which included a quote, “favor composition over inheritance” - (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/65179/where-does-this-concept-of-favor-composition-over-inheritance-come-from)
Take a look at the screenshot I took below (from an unclean browser, sorry) – or you can run a search yourself – and we still see Wikipedia at the top, with its DA 100 (and no quotes); we see stackoverflow rising above stackexchange, with a higher DA; one result has more links than the stackexchange page, one has fewer. But they still perform better.
The stackexchange page with 5 counts of “favor composition over inheritance" (with quotes) is still outranked by the others.
- The 3<sup>rd</sup> result uses the keyword 6 times, twice in quotes.
- The 2<sup>nd</sup> result uses the keyword once without quotes.
- The 1<sup>st</sup> Wikipedia result uses the term once without quotes and still ranks #1 due to its other (better) metrics.
There are a number of factors which could affect the position of these pages for this keyword, such as anchor text for links to those pages, partial match keywords in the text and other ranking factors which I did not look into – but hopefully it will give you a real example of quotation marks not directly affecting the value of a keyword in Google’s eyes.
Write the descriptions the way you that sounds best to you – and optimise them for human readability, as quotes versus no quotes doesn’t make much of a difference.
Hope that helps,
Tom
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How Removing Zombie pages effect on domain authority?
Hi. Recently I got a project (removing zombie pages here: https://www.alamto.com/ ) As you can see this site has about 20k indexed page on google and it seems I should remove about 6000 useless indexed page. does removing (Noindex) these pages affect on the site metrics? Which metrics would affected? and how? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | jafarfahi1 -
How to fix duplicate content for homepage and index.html
Hello, I know this probably gets asked quite a lot but I haven't found a recent post about this in 2018 on Moz Q&A, so I thought I would check in and see what the best route/solution for this issue might be. I'm always really worried about making any (potentially bad/wrong) changes to the site, as it's my livelihood, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction. Moz, SEMRush and several other SEO tools are all reporting that I have duplicate content for my homepage and index.html (same identical page). According to Moz, my homepage (without index.html) has PA 29 and index.html has PA 15. They are both showing Status 200. I read that you can either do a 301 redirect or add rel=canonical I currently have a 301 setup for my http to https page and don't have any rel=canonical added to the site/page. What is the best and safest way to get rid of duplicate content and merge the my non index and index.html homepages together these days? I read that both 301 and canonical pass on link juice but I don't know what the best route for me is given what I said above. Thank you for reading, any input is greatly appreciated!
On-Page Optimization | | dreservices0 -
How do I fix my portfolio causing duplicate content issues?
Hi, Im new to this whole duplicate content issue. I have a website, fatcatpaperie.com that I use the portofolio feature in Wordpress as my gallery for all my wedding invitations. I have a ton of duplicate content issues from this. I don't understand at all how to fix this. I'd appreciate any help! Below is an example of one duplicate content issue. They have slightly different names, different urls, different images and all have no text. But are coming up as duplicates. Would it be as easy as putting a different metadescription for each?? Thanks for the help! Rena | "Treasure" by Designers Fine Press - Fat Cat Paperie http://fatcatpaperie.com/portfolio-item/treasure-designers-fine-press 1 0 0 0 200 3 duplicates "Perennial" by Designers Fine Press - Fat Cat Paperie http://fatcatpaperie.com/portfolio-item/perennial-by-designers-fine-press 1 0 0 0 200 1 of 3 duplicates "Primrose" by Designers Fine Press - Fat Cat Paperie http://fatcatpaperie.com/portfolio-item/8675 1 0 0 0 200 2 of 3 duplicates "Catalina" by Designers Fine Press - Fat Cat Paperie http://fatcatpaperie.com/portfolio-item/catalina-designers-fine-press |
On-Page Optimization | | HonestSEOStudio0 -
SERP Hijacking/Content Theft/ 302 Redirect?
Sorry for the second post, thought this should have it's own. Here is the problem I am facing amongst many others. Let's take the search term "Air Jordan Release Dates 2017" and place it into Google Search. Here is a link:
On-Page Optimization | | SneakerFiles
https://www.google.com/#q=air+jordan+release+dates+2017 Towards the bottom of the page, you will see a website that has SneakerFiles (my website) in the title. The exact title is: Air Jordan Release Dates 2016, 2017 | SneakerFiles - Osce Now, this is my content, but not my website. For some reason, Google thinks this is my site. If you click on the link in search, it automatically redirects you to another page (maybe 302 redirect), but in the cache you can see it's mine:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:qrVEUDE1t48J:www.osce.gob.pe/take_p_firm.asp%3F+&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us I have blocked the websites IP, disallowed my style.css to be used so it just shows a links without the style, still nothing. I have submitted multiple google spam reports as well as feedback from search. At times, my page will return to the search but it gets replaced by this website. I even filed a DMCA with Google, they declined it. I reached out to their Host and Domain register multiple times, never got a response. The sad part about this, it's happening for other keywords, for example if you search "KD 9 Colorways", the first result is for my website but on another domain name (my website does rank 3rd for a different Tag page). The page I worked hard on keeping up to date. I did notice this bit of javascript from the cloaked/hacked/serp hijacking website: I disabled iFrames...(think this helps) so not sure how they are doing this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Note: I am using Wordpress if that means anything.0 -
Is content aggregation good SEO?
I didn't see this topic specifically addressed here: what's the current thinking on using content aggregation for SEO purposes? I'll use flavors.me as an example. Flavors.me lets you set up a domain that pulls in content from a variety of services (Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, RSS, etc.). There's also a limited ability to publish unique content as well. So let's say that we've got MyDomain.com set up, and most of the content is being drawn in from other services. So there's blog posts from WordPress.com, videos from YouTube, a photo gallery from Flickr, etc. How would Google look at this scenario? Is MyDomain.com simply scraped content from the other (more authoritative) sources? Is the aggregated content perceived to "belong" to MyDomain.com or not? And most importantly, if you're aggregating a lot of content related to Topic X, will this content aggregation help MyDomain.com rank for Topic X? Looking forward to the community's thoughts. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | GOODSIR0 -
How do I get other pages to show in SERPs
Why is it that when you google a domain like yahoo.com you sometimes get a main SERP and 6 sub SERPs below it. This concerns the 1st position.
On-Page Optimization | | ribandhull0 -
Percentage of duplicate content allowable
Can you have ANY duplicate content on a page or will the page get penalized by Google? For example if you used a paragraph of Wikipedia content for a definition/description of a medical term, but wrapped it in unique content is that OK or will that land you in the Google / Panda doghouse? If some level of duplicate content is allowable, is there a general rule of thumb ratio unique-to-duplicate content? thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | sportstvjobs0 -
Best practice for franchise sites with duplicated content
I know that duplicated content is a touchy subject but I work with multiple franchise groups and each franchisee wants their own site, however, almost all of the sites use the same content. I want to make sure that Google sees each one of these sites as unique sites and does not penalize them for the following issues. All sites are hosted on the same server therefor the same IP address All sites use generally the same content across their product pages (which are very very important pages) *templated content approved by corporate Almost all sites have the same design (A few of the groups we work with have multiple design options) Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Again Aaron
On-Page Optimization | | Shipyard_Agency0