Here is a new question I have never heard before in the SEO space. Someone asked if "adding punctuation after a link is somehow bad for SEO." He said he heard this as a rumor and didn't know if there is any truth to this. The truth is, this is a myth and this is not true.
John Mueller of Google responded to this on Twitter "no, we don't give any special consideration to punctuation after a link." He later added "I'm not aware of punctuation next to links ever being a factor in crawling, indexing, or ranking with any search engine."
The second part of the question was "Does Google place more importance on backlinks at the beginning of sentences rather than the end?" John didn't really respond to that but the answer is really no.
Here are those tweets:
That's a new one for me - no, we don't give any special consideration to punctuation after a link.
â ð John ð (@JohnMu) May 23, 2021
I'm not aware of punctuation next to links ever being a factor in crawling, indexing, or ranking with any search engine. However, I'm pretty certain if I say that "Google doesn't use punctuation next to links", *someone* will take that as a confirmation that we do use it ðĪŠ
â ð John ð (@JohnMu) May 23, 2021
Forum discussion at Twitter.
