Comments on: Watch Your Punctuation Online

By: Jeet

Jeet — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:08:50 +0000

@Barry: I expected to see a ‘grammar’ tutorial in this post when I saw the title in my reader 😛

But you have some good points there. I think Twitter is wrong in making URLs case insensitive, they should probably redirect other variants to a main URL chosen by the user.

Hypens are often used in domain names but don’t go well with ‘offline’ / mouth to mouth promotion.

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:31:35 +0000

i think if you try to keep you titles and urls clean without too many distracting symbols you should be ok.

By: Erin

Erin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:06:12 +0000

Thanks for replying so quickly! Looking at our pages, the apostrophe doesn’t switch to that ascii thingy in our source, like on the page you gave as an example.

So phew for me 🙂

By: Barry Welford

Barry Welford — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:02:05 +0000

I think the only advice I can give, Erin, is to be very watchful for possible problems. Perhaps they will not occur.

To illustrate, as it happens I wrote a blog post on a St. Patrick’s Day breakfast. The URL is
http://www.otherbb.com/2005/03/st-patricks-day-breakfast-with.html
I used a simple apostrophe but I note that it now appears as a right single quote. From the source code, you can see the following:
< title >St-Patrick & #8217; s Day Breakfast with the Canadian Podcasting Corporation | The Other Blokes Blog< /title >
(spaces added to avoid display problems).
I do not know how that happened. It does not seem to cause a problem in this case. You cannot do much checking as to what effect this has in Google, since the official word is that they ignore punctuation.

BTW you will note that I have now removed the apostrophe from the blog title. It used to be called The Other Bloke’s Blog. Perhaps I’m paranoid …

By: Erin

Erin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:34:27 +0000

We use joomla for our sites and I got the webdev folks to make the title tag and the h1 the same.

But my question is, should I be concerned that our title tags have apostrophes in them? But I can’t see making the title:

St. Patricks Day Worksheets.

Just seems incorrect. What do you think? Or are your concerns here only with WordPress? I may be unaware of your purview.

By: Barry Welford

Barry Welford — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:28:57 +0000

Thank you for the kind comments and glad you find the topic of interest.

@Erin I was specifically referring here to the Title tag and not to headings. With the All-in-one-SEO-pack WordPress plugin you can make the two different if you wish. That is what I would recommend if you want to use punctuation in the < h1 > heading. Otherwise by default, the < h1 > heading is also used as the Title tag.

By: Phillip

Phillip — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:11:36 +0000

Punctuation is important. But it can be tedious to some especially if one does not really know where one should place it. But if you care how your readers read what you have written, you should do your punctuation properly.

By: Josh Curcio

Josh Curcio — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:05:58 +0000

Thanks for the article. This is something that is commonly overlooked. I use Live Writer for blog posts and consistently use punctuation; which does not show properly in the domain name.

Again, thank you for bringing this to our attention. I will keep punctuation in mind when using in certain places.

By: Erin

Erin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:21:41 +0000

When you say title, you mean title tag? Not h1? Or both?

I have a site where we have pages called things like:

St. Patrick’s Day Worksheets
Valentine’s Day Worksheets

I can’t remove the apostrophe, as it would just be grammatically incorrect to remove it.

But the apostrophe shows up in the title tag, the h1, the h2, in all body text.

So have I created a problem?

Would love clarification. Thanks, Erin

By: Joshua Sciarrino - Refuge Design

Joshua Sciarrino - Refuge Design — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 04:33:55 +0000

Quite simply, punctuation marks are not valid characters for a domain name.

Not yet, but soon. Icann could be opening up new domains, not just language friendly but maybe punctuation friendly. Below is a quote about how they are planning on having more multi-language friendly (Arabic, and others)

IDN (internationalized domain names), which will facilitate the use of languages other than English in internet addresses, including languages that do not use the Roman character set, such as Arabic or those that use Cyrillic characters, such as the Slavic languages. Source

Great write up Barry. It’s definitely one of a kind. 🙂