• symbol in title tag

[lighttable]

We have a few title tags with a circular dot symbol, which is created by the code "•"

Humans see a dot, but googlebot sees •

Does this negatively impact our SEO, or is googlebot aware that **• == *** to human eyes

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Graeme

I am unsure of any specific guidelines with regards to HTML special characters but I would tend to keep my page titles to the agreed and safe characters. In this instance, the page title is totally fine but ascii has been abused in page titles in years gone by to create more catchy looking SERP listings.

(¯'·.¸(¯'·.¸Free X !!! Click Here !!!¸.·'´¯)¸.·'´¯)

You may find a variety of things happen and your titles get rewritten.

One other point or perspective - you mention that Googlebot sees the ascii code but a human sees the bullet character. Well, where? How does your SERP listing look? If the page title in the search engine results looks like this:

My Product • Category | Site Name

Then, I would say that is a pretty good reason to do away with the special characters.

If this was me, I would keep it simple, stick with the best practices and make do with standard characters to break up your title tags: - | etc.

Some links that may help:

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624

Hope that helps!
Marcus