Difference between "And" and(!) "-"
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I have a brand name "Smith and Jones". I am looking for the current best way to refer to the name in titles and text on my site.
The manufactureres website is smithandjones.com . The H1 on their home page uses Smith & Jones. The 2 versions are used throughout their site.
In a prior thread (http://www.seomoz.org/q/and-vs) the answer was to use nothing ie "smith jones".
I was thinking that a "-" might be better since google says it tends to show a strong relationship between the 2 words.
What do you think?
Thanks
Handcrafter
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I think you have to be careful when leaving out "Stop Words" because there is not a definitive list of what is a stop word. There are occasions in phrase search where it doesn't make sense for the search engines to leave out what seems like a stop word. For instance "The Who" (rock band). If you do a Google search for "and" you get results that refer to businesses and entities with "and" in the title. I would stick with "and".
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Words like "and" are usually ignored by search engines, but the and symbol (&) is used in parameters and might confuse search engines, I think the best option is to use the hyphen (- ) since "and" will be ignored anyway and cut down on length.
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