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.
Should I include a "|" for better page title SEO results?
-
I have seen many sites that include the "|" in page titles and was wondering if there is some SEO value in the practice.
Example:
Product Name | Company Name
Instead of:
Product Name by Company Name
I have not seen any value in it myself other than a good way to avoid stop words. I wanted to make sure. Currently I have the "by" included in the page titles.
-
I always prefer the pipe for the following reasons, though I don't think it has any specific SEO value.
a) its reader friendly
b) its a natural separator
c) as Seth says below, it looks cool!
d) Whats good for SEOmoz is good for me!
-
SEO advantage I would suggest is negligible, if any in this case - more a case of aesthetics as has been suggested, as well as character count saving.
Section pages I would go with "Section | Company Name"
Product pages I would go with "Product - Section | Company Name"
-
When it comes to a web page Title Tag Google's Supper Smart Spiders pay no attention to the markup or punctuation used. So it truly comes down to the personal preference of the site owner. As for me and my OCD I prefer the Pipes cause they just look cooler!
To prove this point query the following:
allintitle:"-"
allintitle:"|"
allintitle:"/"
allintitle:""
allintitle:","
All come back with BUPKIS
-
| has my vote! More for readability than anything.
-
| has my vote! More for readability than anything.
-
The pipe and hyphen as already suggested are the way to go for pure usability and space saving for your title tag. In my opinion neither has a direct SEO advantage over the other however they both have a distinct advantage over other techniques. For me keeping the keywords used in the page title to the point help without any extra "by, or, and" breaks the keyword blocks both visually and semantically for the search engines. Now don't get me wrong I don't think this makes or breaks a good SEO effort on a page but for me it's certainly a preference.
-
Sounds like it is just an issue of conserving valuable character real estate while being aesthetically pleasing to the reader.
-
I think people prefer pipe symbol over hyphen..as it takes relatively less space...that's the only benefit I have seen..
-
I use the pipe because SEOmoz uses it. Visually it indicates something different is following. I think it more professional looking than the mere dash.
-
I am not sure the is any technical benefit however more used as Alan and EGOL suggest to separate keywords / phrases and increase CTR
-
I don't think that a pipe or dash or any other character adds or subtracts any SEO value. Certainly what you type after it is more important.
If your brand is widely known and respected then adding it might help increase your clickthroughs or conversions.
If you don't have a popular brand then "free shipping"... "learn the secrets!".... or a kickass price in the title tag will pull the visitors in.
... and if you have something that everyone wants such as "free beer" then you might want to included it in CAPS.
-
There's some disagreement in the industry as to whether the pipe symbol or hyphens are best - either way, one of these two would be recommended for readability purposes. This is especially valid when you've got more than one keyword phrase.
Product Name | Alternate Product Name | Company Name
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
-
Landing page separate from product page
Hello there, I have a wordpress website with a woocommerce plugin. I have 4 landing pages that describe my products and at the end of the pages, I have a CTA to my product page. is it bad for SEO? my website: https://relationadviser.ir
On-Page Optimization | | Aaron.be1 -
Site name in page title - leave it or remove it?
Hi all, Recently came across some authority blog (quicksprout to be precise) which stated that apart from main page, contact page, about us and some other generic pages, site name should be removed as it might produce duplicate content. example "How to blog | Example Site name" This mostly is the issue with tags and categories pages as it shows on Moz issues. Is that really a problem and site name should be taken off them? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | Optimal_Strategies1 -
SEO Implications of using Images for Article Titles
Hi guys! New to Moz Pro. I just recently completed an online course with Moz... I have a client who is writing some new content for their site, and we are approaching it with SEO in mind. I was wondering about using an image with text on it as the article title, instead of an actual "text on the page" title. Wondering if that's going to "cost" us anything, SEO wise. I guess we could use alt-text/title/description fields to make sure the keywords are crawlable for our article title but do they have less "weight" than a standard title? How does that work? Hope my question makes sense. Article header attached mB0PXsA.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | JakeWarren1 -
Duplicating words in the page title OK?
Im finding a site with lots of duplicated words in the title tags, I have always avoided doing this in the past, Is there any penalty for having a word repeated twice in the title, indeed is there a benefit from having it twice, IM assuming not
On-Page Optimization | | Donsimong
For example: Marketing Services in Milton Keynes | Our Services | TFA
https://www.t-f-a.co.uk/services the word service is repeated twice, in my opinion this is of no benefit at all and is better rewritten to remove the duplication1 -
Will "internal 301s" have any effect on page rank or the way in which an SE see's our site interlinking?
We've been forced (for scalability) to completely restructure our website in terms of setting out a hierarchy. For example - the old structure : country / city / city area Where we had about 3500 nicely interlinked pages for relevant things like taxis, hotels, apartments etc in that city : We needed to change the structure to be : country / region / area / city / cityarea So as patr of the change we put in place lots of 301s for the permanent movement of pages to the new structure and then we tried to actually change the physical on-page links too. Unfortunately we have left a good 600 or 700 links that point to the old pages, but are picked up by the 301 redirect on page, so we're slowly going through them to ensure the links go to the new location directly (not via the 301). So my question is (sorry for long waffle) : Whilst it must surely be "best practice" for all on-page links to go directly to the 'right' page, are we harming our own interlinking and even 'page rank' by being tardy in working through them manually? Thanks for any help anyone can give.
On-Page Optimization | | TinkyWinky0 -
The word "in" between 2 keywords influence on SEO
Does anybody know when you have the word "in" between two keywords has this a negative influence in Google? For example: "Holiday Home Germany" is the search term in Google
On-Page Optimization | | Bram76
"Holiday Home in Germany" as h1 on our website or do we have to use "Holiday Home Germany" on our website?0 -
Analyzing word count on page SEO
Hey guys quick question, when I am analyzing/ doing word count for a particluar key word and I want to make sure that i am no where near Keyword stuffing, does Google consider the alt and title tags keywords of images as part of the KW count when looking for on page Keyword stuffing. For example. let say I have a page that i just created with 1000 words. and Only 2 of the words are my target Keywords. Then, if i add a picture and add the keyword to both the alt and title tag and description of the image, does google now consider the "page" to have a total of 5 keywords? Also, a lot has changed recently since penguin and panda, is there a good rule of thumb for what ratio to stay under as far as keywords to text.?
On-Page Optimization | | david3050 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5