Special characters in tags and titles for search engine optimization

[artful_7323]

How are special charactes such as dashes and quotation marks treated with adobe search algorithm. For instance whenever "-" is used to join separate words like (close-up). Is close up, close-up, and closeup 3 seperate terms in adobe's search algorithm?  

Also are quotation marks within titles and tags are considered or simply just ignored when it comes to the adobe search engine algorithm? 

[daniellei4510]

Even with Adobe's own keyword suggestions, I've seen closeup, close-up and close up all recommended on occasion. I suspect it doesn't hurt to include all three, but I've always felt that Adobe's search algorithm is very loose. Say I search for, "women with red hair." It wouldn't be unusual for a red apple to turn up, or other images with red objects. As far as titles are concerned, some people even have run-on sentences and even ignore periods, so I wouldn't give quotations and question marks a second thought.

[Jill_C · Accepted solution]

I did a quick experiment in the search box on stock.adobe.com

Closeup face - yielded >6.944 million hits

Close-up face - yielded >6.975 million hits
Close up face - yielded >2.07 million hits

"close up face" - 3,529 hits - (adding quotes around the search terms is to include only results that contact all of the words in quotes)

"close-up face" - 6,987 hits

"close up face" - 12,205 hits

From this, I can conclude that the dash does matter, and that perhaps it's best to include variations in the keywords.

[RALPH_L]

You can answer that question yourself by making at search for each and comparing the results.

Search at: Stock photos, royalty-free images, graphics, vectors & videos | Adobe Stock
Let us know what you discover.
In case you decide not to try it for yourself. The answer is: "Yes those are three different search terms and each returns different results".