This was a myth that had been sent in by a member as they had been told in a site review to take some of my CAPs down to a lower level in my headlines and articles because it was hurting his rankings.
The question was, does Google perceive all CAPS as you are yelling at them and dropping a negative factor for it, or do they even care?
We tested and now know the answer and they made our members day.
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Transcription Below
This debunks the idea of tokenization. Edel Garcia mentions keyword density and optimization techniques do not apply to search engines and one of the reasons is tokenization.
What that is, is when Google scrapes a page and throws it into its own database.
Tokenization says that it will grab all of the words, strip down tags, sizes, case, punctuation.
That is how it will feed it into its database. It wont come in with the tags, case, punctuations, etc.
That is one of the reasons why he says they don't matter and this completely debunks that.
When the all caps page loses every time, that means Google is seeing that.
Another thing is, John Limbocker has this theory on what makes a click stronger.
This comes from his review of Google's patents. It is the likelihood of a click. If a link is more likely to be clicked, it is a stronger link than others.
Some of the things they said that you could do in Limbocker's theory is you can change the font and size and it will actually be stronger.
What's interesting is, if all caps can actually penalize you, this makes sense to me - that you could do things that would influence things in a positive way.
The reason that Google would care about all caps is because it is looking at it for importance.
Use a slightly larger font for that link (don't go crazy and all capping everything) might make it stronger.
This is something that we'd want to test down the road but that kind of jives with John's theory.
In addition to seeing the negative aspects of all caps, it is actually exciting to apply this to future tests - to see if we can make our links stronger just by doing something very small and easy to do and would take one second.
That is what is fun with this sort of tests. It can lead into other things wherein we could take advantage and get even bigger edges. Not only to avoid a problem, but to also create a benefit.