2009-11-17, 22:44:55
It should not matter for the crawlers. If it does, then the crawler is not supporting HTML and in that case you shouldn't even care for it.
In the case of Google, they are big and have very complex software to crawl the web. They support HTML entities. They even support them if you put them in the searchbox!
As early as 2004 the Search Engine Roundtable already stated that they don't hurt SEO, and back then the crawlers were less complex than today.
Add this up with the fact that certain signs must be encoded for your pages to be valid XHTML (like the ampersand &) and I think we can say that search engines do not care.
In the case of Google, they are big and have very complex software to crawl the web. They support HTML entities. They even support them if you put them in the searchbox!
As early as 2004 the Search Engine Roundtable already stated that they don't hurt SEO, and back then the crawlers were less complex than today.
Add this up with the fact that certain signs must be encoded for your pages to be valid XHTML (like the ampersand &) and I think we can say that search engines do not care.
“Don’t forget the important ˚ (not °) on the a,†says the Unicode lover.
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Help us test a key change for the core! ¶ Problems with GetSimple? Be sure to enable debug mode!