Does having dots in my brand name hurt my SEO? ie: BoatU.S. vs BoatUS ?

[BoatUS]

Our official brand name has dots in it and we're wondering if having those dots will hurt our organic ranking and (or) lead to a mis-interpreted crawl by the bots..

[mememax]

mmmm I'm not sure if I understand the problem correctly.

There is no way you could register a domain with dots in it. So you're suggesting that Google may have an issue if your page title is including dots in crawling the URL? If that's the case no worries.

Aside from my personal experience you can check this page: https://www.bls.gov google doesn't get confused by the U.S. in the title of the page and correctly show it in the SERPs. Note that dots are not usually part of the query, with some very rare circumstances where its presence change the meaning of a word.

Your case is a good example, google will understand that your site is about USA and not about "us", despite you not adding dots.

I hope this helps.

[BoatUS]

Thanks for the response!

Yes, I was wondering if having dots in the on page elements "ie: tile tags, h1, description, etc" would hurt SEO or confuse bots when crawling. My understanding is that it doesn't due to the semantic approach Google bots use when crawling but I wasn't 100% sure

Thanks for confirming!

Youssef