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My client's name company has a flipped letter on its name, so for example "PEOPLE" the P is flipped, I managed to flip the P with 2 span tags, but now I am thinking to do this for SEO reasons is not good, because of the SPANS. I have the feeling the search engines might not underestand a flipped P, and it is better just use a normal name. What do you think? thanks,

the flip html is <span class="flip"><span>P</span></span>

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can u share the code used for flipping "P". – Rishabh Jun 18 '12 at 7:04
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Sidenote: Why two spantags, one should be enough. You could even use the pseudoclass :first-letter. And generally i would say it doesn't matter as long as the rest of your document is SEO-conform. – Christoph Jun 18 '12 at 7:36
Span doesn't carry any meaning, Google will not care about this. – Rich Bradshaw Jun 18 '12 at 8:35
hmm as per my understanding to flip a text, you use this position:absolute; -moz-transform: scaleX(-1); /* Gecko / -o-transform: scaleX(-1); / Operah / -webkit-transform: scaleX(-1); / webkit / transform: scaleX(-1); / standard / filter: FlipH; / IE 6/7/8 */, which needs to be relative to the position where this character is inserted, that will be the first span – MariaZ Jun 18 '12 at 8:51
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The better question is "Do humans enter searches using flipped letters"? If not, then no... It doesn't help SEO. – Fiasco Labs Jun 18 '12 at 14:45
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jun 18 '12 at 12:56

4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

Flipping text is good for SEO?

No, it is not.

Use of <span> will affect how some search engines render your site's text in result snippets and whether or not your company's name is treated as a single word or a series of words (Google tends to add a space character before and after <span> contents - comp<span>P</span>any is treated as though it were com P any).

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Interesting, I've never seen this occurring. Do you have any live examples? What about using a tag like <b>? – DisgruntledGoat Jun 18 '12 at 23:38
@DisgruntledGoat I've only seen this effect with <span> from attempting to apply drop caps within a word in a heading (e.g. <h1>Le<span>F</span>ree</h1>) - discontinued this practice when I noticed it on my own site in 2004-2005, haven't had any luck finding a recent example, though I did find counter-examples (no spacing added) where <span> was being used outside of a heading. – danlefree♦ Jun 19 '12 at 9:57
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Two possible solutions:

  • Flip the P wherever you like, and put a text with a normal P next to it (h1/h2/within a span/etc) that you hide with css.
  • use an image of the logo or text with the flipped p. Assign an alt prop to it and as above solution, add a hidden text here as well.

I would go for the latter one.

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Hidding with CSS a text which want to index is a bad practice that Google forbids. It will not take care of the text if it is not visible and the page rank of the page can be downvoted. – Jerome C. Jun 18 '12 at 10:28
Well there are more options than setting hidden as a property... And the alt property of an img tag should take care of being found by Google, right? – poepje Jun 18 '12 at 10:34
up vote 1 down vote

SEO might be affected or it might NOT. It should be easy to test, once your site has been indexed by Google you can see if it reads the word "people" or not, and by looking at the search results you could see if Google shows "PEOPLE" or "PEO P LE" in its text snippets.

Anyway a good Search Engine Optimization of your site can be done even by keeping a flipped 'P', in other words: if you have only one place with the word 'PEOPLE' with a flipped 'P' even if it affects SEO it will be such a small hit that no one will ever notice.

In the worst scenario you can always replace the PEOPLE logo with an image with alt="PEOPLE..."

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up vote 0 down vote

sure it can cause problems but if you want benefit of the SEO and of your design, keep using such a span but add a surrounding div with an itemprop property.

itemprop is a microdata tag, which comes with HTML5, it allows to add more definition to your page in purpose of search engine (semantic).

You can use standard schemas that common search engines understand here: http://www.schema.org/

Hope it will help.

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