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So let's say you are a big fan of writing content with quotes or brackets but all of a sudden you learn about this thing called SEO [search engine optimization] and you become paranoid that your "SEO" won't be "optimal" if you use brackets a lot of quotes or brackets. Why? Because maybe, just maybe, Google will think that "SEO" means something different than [SEO] or (SEO)?
The question came up on Twitter and Pete Meyers from Moz answered it and John Mueller responded to his answer with a thumbs up.
In short, it doesn't matter much unless it changes the meaning of the sentence or words.
Here are the tweets:
Best I know, Google ignores most extra characters unless they have special meaning. "$20" is clearly different from "20", but "(Donna Snow)" doesn't generally carry different meaning than "Donna Snow" beyond emphasis (and that's very contextual).
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) April 2, 2018
This is speculative on my part, but I think one impact of ML is that sometimes these characters are interpreted more contextually. That is to say, I'm not sure there's a one-size-fits-all answer for any given character. I wouldn't obsess over this one, though.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) April 2, 2018
Many words and phrases, including nicknames, naturally appear in quotation marks. Do a search for 'Peter "Dr. Pete" Meyers' and you'll see my LinkedIn profile, some blog posts, etc. That's perfectly natural usage.
— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) April 2, 2018
John's head nod, in John fashion:
That matches my "understanding" too; thanks, Pete!
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) April 2, 2018
Of course, using brackets or quotes in your search may and often does change how the search results get returned, but that is easy to test also.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
