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Weird characters/symbols in anchor text in source code, but not page?

by IM Crusader
5 replies
  • SEO
    • |
So I'm doing some research on a competitor, and I was going through his source code and noticed this between the anchor tags where the anchor text goes:
black chair set

Now that's in the source code. However, on the actual page, it displays the anchor text as: black chair set

So what are those weird
Â
symbols, and why are they showing in the source code but not on the displayed page?

EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY, does Google recognize this anchor text as the one with the symbols or the one without?
#anchor #characters or symbols #code #page #source #text #weird
  • Profile picture of the author IM Crusader
    Ahhh okay so out of curiosity I started checking my sites to see if some of my outgoing links are showing up with that weird character too. And they are! And they are links that I am pointing at some people's sites who are renting links from me. Can someone please help and let me know what this symbol is and whether or not Google uses ignores it when looking at the anchor text?
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Look at the Google Cache (text version) & see how the anchor-text is being displayed.
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  • Profile picture of the author IM Crusader
    Hmmm, I didn't even think of that. Well it doesn't display the character in either of the Google caches (regular and text), nor does that weird character show up when fetching as GoogleBot. I guess Google is smart enough to ignore these phantom characters in anchor text (I hope).
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    • Profile picture of the author richblogs
      Originally Posted by IM Crusader View Post

      Hmmm, I didn't even think of that. Well it doesn't display the character in either of the Google caches (regular and text), nor does that weird character show up when fetching as GoogleBot. I guess Google is smart enough to ignore these phantom characters in anchor text (I hope).
      The issue is a common symptom of character encoding mismatches between the input and the output. If not explicitly set, character encoding can be be defaulted and mismatches can occur at various stages of serving a web page.

      Google is a clever so and so, and probably is able to resolve character encoding problems contextually - hence what you see is fine, yet what is actually there underlying is not.
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  • Profile picture of the author bgs
    There are lots of people selling "Unique" articles out there and they have just encoded them. I guess if you encode your text then CopyScape see's it as unique. A lot of people use CopyScape to check their Uniqueness and all these articles are passing the test.

    Here's my question. The encoding fools CopyScape. But does it fool Google? Does Google see encoded text as unique simply because of it's formatting? Or does Google read the words and look for duplicates based on context and ignore formatting?

    If Google is ignoring all the encoding in the text then it's pointless to buy encoded articles. And you may be hosting LOTS of duplicate content without even knowing it. (if you trust CopyScape)
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