[ggreer]

This post is from 2011. I can't remember any result in the past three years that used this trick, which makes me suspect that Google has fixed the issue. Still, it'd be nice to know more. I haven't found any posts on this topic besides the one already linked to.

[jrabone]

Google might have fixed it but Facebook haven't - the sidebar on the desktop site is full off bottom-feeder adverts for weight loss, hot dates etc. using non ASCII lookalike glyphs (usually accents or composing diacritics). I wonder if they are working around some Facebook ban on certain ads?

Spammers are still using this trick in email (usually subject lines) - I actually started writing a decomposer / normaliser plugin for SpamAssassin, then realised it was cheaper to just penalise Unicode-encoded subjects. This is why we can't have nice things.

[adamlj]

I'm not sure Google is actively punishing this strategy but the text doesn't look good at all in the SERP. The title of the page is displayed as "Ｕｎｉｃｏｄｅ － Ｆｕｌｌｗｉｄｔｈ － Ｚｅｉｃｈｅｎ" [0]

[0] https://google.com/search?q=site:linkstrasse.de

[vog]

> which makes me suspect that Google has fixed the issue

It would be interesting to know if Google is actively punishing such sites (low page rank, or not showing those at all), as it does with many other nasty SEO tricks.

[andmarios]

I think these sites are punishing themselves. Using this trick would repulse more visitors than it would attract.

[Jamie452]

I'm confused how this trick can benefit SEO?

[chrisfarms]

It wouldn't have done anything for ranking ... but I guess the idea was to increase click's the same way people used to love a good...

    `·.¸¸.·´´¯`··._.· My Homepage `·.¸¸.·´´¯`··._.· 

..type <title> banner to get attension.