How does Google interpret articles or prepositions in languages where it's attached to the (key)word?

[debi_zyx]

Hi, All!

This is for any foreign language SEOs where articles or prepostitions such as "the" "to" "in" or anything else are actually part of the word they are modifying and not a separate word, as in English:

How does Google understand those words on-page and in anchor text?  If you want to optimize for the word "house", and your content/anchor text says "the house" or "in the house" (again, all one word) - what does Google count that as?  Does it count toward "house"?  Does it count toward "in the house" only?  Does it count toward "house" but not as much as if you had just put "house"?

I end up sometimes writing slightly grammatically-off content because I want to optimize for the keyphrase - but is that necessary?

Obviously different languages might be different, but you can probably project a little from one to the others.

Thanks in advance!

[Dan-Petrovic]

I have done SEO for Serbian and German and our texts were written in a natural unaltered language. This presented no obstacle with the rankings.

[petrakraft]

Hi Debi,

as far as I know those words are filtered out by the search enginges - regardless what language they are written.

They have no relevance for the interpretation of the written text and have only grammatically and syntactic functions. I didn't test it though, but I think there is no difference if you write e.g. the anchor text with our without them.

[debi_zyx]

I'd just like to clarify - in Hebrew, the additional "words" are actually additional letters added to the beginning or end (or both) of the keyword.

It's as if in English you would write "when you (masculine singular) want" as "whenyoumswant", i.e. in a single word. Do you think that Google would be able to work out which words were really part of whenyoumswant?

[GrouchyKids]

This might help see the thinking on SEOmoz domain name http://www.seomoz.org/blog/answering-hard-seo-questions-whiteboard-friday

[debi_zyx]

Hi Justin,

Thanks for the reply (and the link, of course!) - must have missed that whiteboard friday video.....

OK, so my interpretation of that is that if the additional letters change the word enough, it probably won't rank for the basic word. If the changes are reasonably simple (like singular/plural) then I guess that Google can work that out. Also (although not mentioned in the video), if you have a word made up of a couple of real words, like bluewidget.com, it seems that Google can work out which word is which.

Would you agree?

[AlanMosley]

They can do this stuff in english,, but i dont know how far they have got with stuff like this in other lingos

[Gyi]

Also check out SEO By The Sea's posts on phrasification which i think may be applicable to issues like this: http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=5483

[jaraca]

Very insightful anserws, thanks!