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Comment by romland | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely a valid concern. I can imagine there are plenty of (non-global) search-engines out there that trip over this issue (in fact, now that I think about it, I don't think I -ever- took it into consideration. Hmm.).

I implemented something similar (soft hyphenation related) some years back and ended up looking into just what you're asking about. My conclusion then was: The big ones act nicely, and that's about where I stopped looking.

A quick Google for "soft hyphens and google" will give a good indication or simply search this page for "google": http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/shy.html

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First off, kickass site, very impressive that you did this, let alone over the weekend. I look forward to browsing through the source.

OK, so general SEO question. Do search engines trip up after this? Why? Are they parsing HTML straight up or do they have funky rules?

FOR EXAMPLE, I have heard that <h1> gives benefit to enclosed text. i have wondered this: but can u just have jquery automatically replace it on pageload and then get credit for arbitrary keywords while actually presenting the viewer with different phrasing. wouldn't that work?

anyway, couldn't you apply my idea similarly? this would be a really simple jquery plugin

It's called "cloaking" and Google looks down heavily (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...) on it:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

Well I think that if you cater to your users with soft hyphens but show the unhyphenated content to Google, it wouldn't make sense for them to look down on that. But a possible risk is that they do scan for cloaking and automatically deduct for that. Though that would be a rather sophisticated system. Then again, they are Google.

Oh yeah, Google's tech support system sucks btw. Someone would make big bucks if they found a way to make that fun and efficient for their tech support staff. Tech support in general. It's rarely fun to call in to tech support. Shouldn't it be fun? Zappos style. Duuude: SMS text support. Text your initial question, and someone calls you. Kinda like Aardvark except now.

http://www.facebook.com/Eckharttolle

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