Soft Hyphenation: Influence on Search Engines

[zeepartner]

Does anyone have experience on soft hyphenation and its effects on rankings?

We are planning to use  ­ in our company blog to improve the layout. Currently, every word above 4 syllable will be soft hyphenated.
This seems to render okay in all browsers, but it might be a problem with IE9...

In HTML 5, the "­" soft hyphenation seems to be replaced with the <wbr> Tag (http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_wbr.asp) and i don't find anything else about soft-hyphenation in the specs.

Any experiences or opinions about this? Do you think it affects rankings if there are a lot of soft hyphens in the text?

Does it still make sense to use ­ or would you switch to <wbr> already?

[zeepartner]

Hi Stephen

Thanks for your thoughts. Personally I don't think we need this but people from corporate communication somehow got stuck on this idea. See if I can scare them out of it by mentioning load time...

[firstconversion]

Whew, had to go google that one - soft hyphenation for the lulz! No, I would expect no effect, or no measurable effect. As a standard part of grammar so I would expect search engines to deal with this as natural language

btw, I have seen this in action in the past and its made the text look worse, been an unnecessary extra load & gone wrong quite a bit, requiring troubleshooting and maintenance (was from a plugin tho)

You sure you need this?