Does anyone here know if using WordPress shortcodes for dropcaps to begin an opening paragraph of an article have a bad/negative impact on SEO traffic? Let me further explain. For styling purposes on one of my blogs I use a shortcode to make a dropcap for the first letter of the first paragraph of any new article entry. So it looks something like: [dropcap style'1'......]A[/dropcap] My question is, when SE's crawl your site, and the first item they see on your page is a shortcode, do they get confused which results in bad indexing or poor rankings? Maybe this should be obvious, but I sincerely don't know if this has a bad impact thus the reason I'm asking members of this forum for any help and advice on this matter.
I seriously doubt it, google sees the output basically. You should be fine and dropcaps are cool looking in most cases, if its relevant. hope that helps, Nigel
Thanks Nigel, that does help. Still don't know for certain but you raise a good point and I'm guessing you're right. Would just be painful to put so much work into writing unique and original content only to have it not be indexed over something so simple as using or not using a shortcode for letter styling.
Well essentially, my answer is no, it won't hurt a thing. Its just typically not a real sound idea to speak in absolutes when dealing with google but I can see no reason what so ever that it would hurt anything. Google should read drop caps as one word really. Nigel