Effect of Using Zero-width Non-joiner instead of Space on SEO

Question

I have a website which is in Persian language. While optimizing titles for SEO, I wondered if zero-width non-joiner (U+200c) has a negative effect or not.

Wikipedia page about zwnj.

As this character has no usage in English writing (am I right?), I was unable to find anything about this and only found some local blog posts which said (with little to no technical details) it doesn't really matter whether you use space or zwnj.

I tried searching my website's name on google, one time with spaces and next time with "zwnj"s; but surprisingly, google found no results when I used zwnj! I thought Google will understand it's also a kind of space and will return same results, but it seems I was wrong. In addition, as for typing zwnj users need to press ctrl+shift+2 (or shift+space), almost nobody do this.

Now, with these two factors, should I use this character or not? The reason why I am asking this is because this character is used for making Persian text more beautiful and also easier to read, but it isn't a huge grammatical error to put words together or use a normal space.

Update

I tried a website-wide search using site:mysite.ir in google and searched a word with 3 different versions (میسازیم، می‌سازیم، می سازیم) and this time google was able to bring in the same results.

Answer 1

I've read a lot of things about the fact that Google is really good with Latin languages, but not so good with others and that probably includes Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, etc.

For sure, Google does not have as much of an impact in Russia (Yandex), China (Baidu), Japan (Yahoo!¹), South Korea (Naver), ...

That being said, according to Matt Cutts, the best practice is to please your readers. If you do that consistently and the right way, eventually you will have the best website. SEO is not just always appearing as #1 in the search engines. Having other people link to your site is also a big (if not the biggest/best) way to get traffic and recognition.

So if your site will look better with U+200C instead of U+20, I would use the U+200C.

¹ Apparently, the Yahoo! search in Japan is powered by Google in the backend. I'm not too sure how that can really work.