(Entry was posted by Gaston Sitbo on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 07/08/2021).

When there`s punctuation next to keywords

Here`s a dumb question...Does google treat keywords differently when there`s punctuation next to them?I`ll give you an example:Should I write my sentence - "What`s the difference between Cappuccino, Latte, and Flat-White?"Or should I write - "What`s the difference between Cappuccino , Latte , and Flat-White ?"In the second sentence I`m putting a space between the keywords and the commas & question mark.The second one doesn`t feel natural BUT if someone searches for "what`s the difference between Flat White and Cappuccino" I want them to find my answer and that`s why I`m hesitant to have punctuation right beside some of the words.

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Sanket Maheshwari: I would go for more "natural" sounding English, or, technically the correct version of English.

The only place where I can think of anything creating any difference is hyphen inbetween words. Apart from spacing like the one you`re talking about don`t create any real world experience.
Gaston Sitbon: You mean when I`m using "flat-white" vs "flat white"?

I`m doing this because I`m using the free version of yoast and they recommend limiting the keywords per post to 4, so I`m using the hyphen to turn the two words into (kind of) 1
Christine Hansen: Gaston Sitbon Would be a lot easier if you just used 5 or 6 or even 7 keywords. Yoast is only recommending. It is not a rule!
Richard Hearne: I think bad punctuation - i.e. spaces around the comma - is more likely to get you into trouble than to get you more search referrals. I don`t think that Google`s algos would downgrade the comma version of the string you mention. I do think that they pay (negative) attention to content quality, which includes bad punctuation, typos etc.
Gaston Sitbon: Thx for the info
James Michael: This comes down to user friendliness, what`s best for the user? Google has probably factored in that sites with bad spelling, grammar and punctuation are less likely to be authentic and credible than ones with good grammar, spelling and punctuation and therefore penalises them.
Travis Bailey: It could possibly result in a list item snippet, though I haven`t been paying enough attention to be sure. I think that`s about it.
Josh Levenson: You`re over-thinking it. Write like a normal person. Google is trained to identify and deal with punctuation and stop words.
Becky Westmoreland: Google isnâ€™t about exact keywords anymore. Stick with correct grammar please
Ammon Johns: I`ve been doing this stuff longer than Google have, and I cannot remember a time when Google ever cared about punctuation characters except when they were part of a URL (e.g. hyphens, query strings, ampersands), or when they were part of the query as operators. Not ever.

Heck, it wasn`t until they started to focus on NLP in the past recent years that they even cared to differentiate between small stop-words like `and`, `of`, `the`, etc, and that only because they`d started to parse entire phrases rather than words.

On a page, outside of in a URL, or something marked as code, I don`t believe Google even track what punctuation is used, and I`m pretty sure they basically ignore them all.

People, however, don`t, and you`ll get more natural links to things that are exceptionally well written, than to things that look flawed, or fake, or even machine generated.