Introduction
A problem with writing HTML pages for agglutinative languages, is that search engines generally work poorly when trying to parse them. Often-times, searches with correctly written concatenated words will be suggested rewritten to the incorrect form.
In the above example, Google suggests that splitting the word ‘solcellepanelforskning’ (‘research on solar panels’ would be the correctly spelled word, which of course it isn’t. Now, for those writing web pages, this matters. You need to write your headings in a way that yields the most hits to your page. There are generally only three options here that I am aware of:
- Train search engines.
- Incorrectly space the words, but use
letter-spacing
to make it look right. - Incorrectly space the words, but with either
​
(zero width space) or
(zero width no-break space).
Problems
1: Train search engines
It may not be a meme, but training Google to prefer giraffes is documented. Ads are one thing, but the number of hits a page gets will get the more attention from Google or other search engines. This is, in other words, doable, but it requires labour and lots of it.
2: CSS-trick letter-spacing
The trick is simple enough to execute (combination of span class
and a similar class performing the desired spacing), but this has two issues: You get messy HTML for one, but what is even worse, is that oral readers will incorrectly insert a pause between words, where there should be none. An example of this in English, would be the difference between ‘every day’ and ‘everyday’.
3: Zero width spaces
These have the advantage of removing the need for a special class defined in CSS, yielding a somewhat (though admittedly not much) less messy HTML code. However, considering that these are not standard, this could perhaps cause problems with rendering on some devices. Further, you still get the issue (I would assume) with oral readers, as stated in 2 supra.
Question
How do search engines treat none- 
spaces? And for bonus points, which of options two and three would be the better choice, if one desires compatibility across renderers, both visual and oral ones?
solcellepanelforskning
vssolcellepanel forskning
, I think it's just unfortunate in this instance that the single word can be split into "two valid words" and this returns a vastly larger number of results: only 2 (incl this page!) for the one word vs 39,800 respectively (UK locale)! So is suggesting/favouring the later. Note that it is searching for "two separate words", not a single phrase separated by a space. If I search for the exact phrase"solcellepanel forskning"
(ie. the two words separated by a space) then there are actually NO results that contain that exact phrase.