I'm working on a website for a company that manages about 500 apartments.

On the home page, we have listings of all the apartments that are currently available for rent. I've been using the <abbr> tag to work the word "apartment" into the listings, like this:

<abbr title="one bedroom apartment">1BR</abbr>

I'm just curious to know what effect, if any, this might have on search results for the word "apartment". I'm guessing most engines don't look at abbreviations closely, but I might be wrong...

I've never even heard of this tag, but I can certainly see google paying attention to it. Another trick I use is to wrap quoted text in <blockquote cite=> html, specifying the source. I'm hoping it helps me avoid a duplicate content penalty for longer paragraphs.

Wow. A reply from the Queen herself. I rule!

Seriously, the apartment listings appear on screen kind of like classified ads, so tags like "Studio" or "2BR" is all I have room for. I know search engines can get downright nasty with you if you put semantic code in your HTML then hide it with visibility:hidden or a big negative indent. With this in mind, I chose to play by the rules and use <abbr>, but who knows if nice guys will finish last?

I frequently use "display:none" on DaniWeb, but not to be tricky. It's to handle a lot of our JavaScript features such as dropdown menus that I only want to appear when user action is taken. Think that it hurts me?