How do SE's see abbreviated queries.

[Shawn_Huber]

Do search engines pay attention to periods in abbreviated queries? If I use Mt. Bachelor all over my site, would SE's not rank my site well for queries that use Mt Bachelor?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

They are smart enough to figure it out. Just did searches to "mt kilimanjaro" v "mt. kilimanjaro" and the results returned were identical (meaning they consider them identical).

However, a search for "mount kilimanjaro" produced slightly different results so "mount v mt" usage on site may affect rankings but a period wont.

[Francisco_Meza]

They are looked at as spaces just like hyphens. As far as I remember, Matt Cutts says the only symbols that count as a character are underscores. Everything else is a space.