Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
What punctuation can you use in meta tags? Are there any Google does not like?
-
So I know you can use dashes and | in meta tags, but can anyone tell me what other punctuation you can use? Also, it'd be great to know what punctuation you can't use. Thanks!
-
One of biggest mistakes I used to make - and I had no idea I was making it at the time - was in trying to be too cute with my H1s, H2s and meta tags/meta descriptions. How? I focused more on using fancy punctuation (e.g., dashes, pipes and colons, especially) than I did on the message I hoped to get across to readers.
This was in 2010. Eventually, I discerned the trouble I was creating for myself, and not simply in the eyes of Google.
Instead of thinking about what punctuation Google "recognizes," think of how you can deliver your information in the simplest, easiest-to-digest manner possible. When we attempt to get too cute with our punctuation, we must rely too heavily on someone/something else (e.g., search engines) to deliver our message in the way we hope to convey it; most important, though, it takes the emphasis off of the user, which is always, ALWAYS more interested in the best, most apropos result, not the result that highlights our prowess as A-List grammarians and punctuation scholars.
My advice: Write simply to convey your message thoroughly. More often than not that means few words and even fewer punctuation characters.
RS
-
I assume you are looking for something different. Though on basics as a general rule use the pipe instead of the hyphen. It tends to have a higher CTR and uses less pixels. A win/win.
On out of the box - it is limited emojis were able to be used in part for a while, but google eliminates them or they get read improperly on different browsers. So stay clear.
The best one out of the box is the tick. See actual meta below.
We connect for FREE Babysitters & Parents. ✓ Green ID available ✓ Free for Babysitters ✓ Free for Parents ✓ Advanced Search Options ✓ Find babysitters.
But customers generally prefer a well written meta making a clear call to action, and make a distinct statement that matches searchers intent.
Hope that assists.
-
Hey Sarah,
It's always recommended to use words that makes sense to people and search engines. For punctuations in particular, Google usually ignore them with the exception of some.
The punctuations that you can use are: hyphen, underscores, pipes & colon.
The punctuations that should be avoided are: ' + . , | ! " $ % / ( ) = ? ^ * ; > ] [ @' For more details, refer to this article:
http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/watch-your-punctuation-online.htmlHope this helps!
Umar
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
In writing the url, it is better to use the language used by the people of my country or English?
We speak Persian and all people search in Persian on Google. But I read in some sources that the url should be in English. Please tell me which language to use for url writing?
Technical SEO | | ghesta
For example, I brought down two models: 1fb0e134-10dc-4737-904f-bfdf07143a98-image.png https://ghesta.ir/blog/how-to-become-rich/
2)https://ghesta.ir/blog/چگونه-پولدار-شویم/0 -
Can I safely delete unused tags??
Can I safely delete unused tags, ones with 0 posts connected to them? Thanks, Mike
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
How to track my actual traffic source using Google Analytics which are now showing as referral traffic?
Hi Mozzers, I went through many Q&As in the community this morning. I found a solution where I could just remove the referral site in analytics>admin>property>tracking info>referral exclusion list. So I removed paypal.com which was the main referral traffic. I thought the problem is solved. Later today I got another order, now the referral traffic is from eway.com, now what? Yes I know I will add this to the exclusion list but there will be many more referral sites. My main concern is I am not able to track the actual traffic source. How do I do that? 1. Do I need to use google url tracking for all my pages?
Technical SEO | | DebashishB
2. Do I need to add tracking code in each page of the site?
3. Is there a way to track the actual source of this traffic, now that the transaction is already made but reflects as referral traffic in Google Analytics? jZjTN0 -
Google is shortening many of my title tags although they are already quite concise
Hi, Title tags of our website are being truncated by Google even though they can be very short (sometimes < 40 characters) and with very few capital letters. We would like to understand why. Example: Principal component analysis (pca) in abcde - OurBrand shows up as: Principal component analysis (pca) in abcd... - OurBrand where abcde is the name of a very common software (5 characters), and OurBrand is a 6 characters long string (could be used in either lower case or upper case). Even when removing the brackets around pca, truncation still occurs... Any clue why?
Technical SEO | | trigaudias1 -
Can you use Screaming Frog to find all instances of relative or absolute linking?
My client wants to pull every instance of an absolute URL on their site so that they can update them for an upcoming migration to HTTPS (the majority of the site uses relative linking). Is there a way to use the extraction tool in Screaming Frog to crawl one page at a time and extract every occurrence of _href="http://" _? I have gone back and forth between using an x-path extractor as well as a regex and have had no luck with either. Ex. X-path: //*[starts-with(@href, “http://”)][1] Ex. Regex: href=\”//
Technical SEO | | Merkle-Impaqt0 -
Why are Google search results different if you are log'd into Google or not?
I get different results when I'm log'd into my Google account associated with my website than if I'm not. The same country is occurring. So how can I rely on the google results I'm seeing? For instance my site is page 1 with the improvements I made based on SEOMOZ if I'm log'd in. Yet I'm not on the first 25 pages if I'm not logged in.
Technical SEO | | Romana0 -
Tags showing up in Google
Yesterday a user pointed out to me that Tags were being indexed in Google search results and that was not a good idea. I went into my Yoast settings and checked the "nofollow, index" in my Taxanomies, but when checking the source code for no follow, I found nothing. So instead, I went into the robot.txt and disallowed /tag/ Is that ok? or is that a bad idea? The site is The Tech Block for anyone interested in looking.
Technical SEO | | ttb0 -
What can I do about missing Meta Description for category pagest etc.?
On all my campaigns I'm returning high levels of 'Missing Meta Description Tags'. The problem with fixing this is they're all for category, tag and author pages. Is there a way to add a meta description to these pages (there are hundreds) or will it not really have any ranking effect?
Technical SEO | | SiliconBeachTraining0