does breaking a word with a span tag effect seo

Question

I was wondering whether breaking up a word with a span tag to change the font size of the first letter, will effect google bots ability to read the word? The words effected by this are keywords.

Answer 1

No, this won't harm your SEO efforts. It's normal to use markup for visual effects and since <span> has no semantic meaning it clearly won't change the weight of the word to the search engines.

Answer 2

There is no definitive answer: there are no specifications on what search engines do, and they are different. It is natural to expect that they ignore span markup, but they need not do that.

But if there is a simple way to avoid splitting a word with such markup, it is safest to take that way.

Answer 3

You can do both the compound and separate words. For example, the word paperweight can be optimized for both paperweight and "paper weight". Use the HTML span tag and Google will rank for both paperweight and “paper weight” and your user will see the proper paperweight. See https://plus.google.com/communities/104061601962995568302 for details and how this was proved.