On April 5th, Search Engine Roundtable had an article on whether Google treats content in quotation marks, brackets, or parentheses differently. The answer, “according to Google,” is that no - content is treated the same way. Something we found interesting is that Pete Meyers from MOZ answered the question, and then John Mueller confirmed it. But is it true? We test that out.
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This comes from an SEORoundtable. I enjoy these tremendously when they make these kinds of statements. It was tweeted at John Mueller and Doctor Pete from MOZ and the answer was that there was no difference. John Mueller tweeted his agreement – That matches my “understanding”. I say that he is trying to be funny with those quotes but really, it doesn’t make me feel any better.
If you read the article, they also talk about parenthesis. We are looking at quotes, parenthesis, and brackets. We are going to run this both ways and I started with parenthesis because it seemed like a more natural thing. It seems pretty unusual for me that you would put something in brackets. More likely that you have something in parenthesis. So we are looking at parenthesis vs quotes in this test to see if they are treated differently.
Here you can see that we have keywords added in quotes for our 1, 2, 4, and 5, and keyword added in parenthesis in 3. In the end, when just running the test to see if they are treated differently, there was no change at all. Then running the search with parenthesis and with quotes to see if there were changes, what I found really interesting there was there wasn’t any change. Even though these pages have parenthesis on them, the bottom 4 or 5 spot did not jump to 3. Same with the quotes, number 3 with the quotes did not jump anybody even though that search matched the keywords that were on the page. Pretty safe to say then that they were not lying on this one if that was the situation of quotes and parenthesis being treated the same.
Now, brackets can mean different things and quoting languages so we are going to run brackets as well just to see if it is possible that search modifiers, you know there are a lot of weird stuff in search modifiers, there is a possibility that there is some residue hanging back with something from back in the day when search modifiers work, so we are running this test now with the brackets. But as it stands, when you are talking about quotes vs parenthesis, they are treated exactly the same and it looks like they are completely ignored.