Improve CTR with Special Characters in Meta-Description / Title Tags
-
I've seen this question asked a few times, but I haven't found a definitive answer. I'm quite surprised no one from Google has addressed the question specifically.
I ran across this post the other day and it piqued my interest:
If you're able to make your result stand out by using stars, smiley faces, TM symbols, etc it would be a big advantage. This is in use currently if you search for a popular mattress keyword in Google. It really is amazing how the special characters draw your attention to the title. You can also see the TM and Copyright symbols if you search for "Logitech Revue" Radioshack is using these characters in their adwords also.
Has anyone found any definitive answers to this? Has anyone tracked CTR and long-term results with special characters in title or description tags?
Any chance of getting penalized for using this?
As a follow-up, it looks like you could also put check symbols into your meta-description tags. That has all kinds of interesting possibilities.
-
I'm interested to know if there's any new insight on this, as I'm tempted to use a special character as it is the literal brand name of the company. My intention is to prepend the company name with the symbol but I'm concerned it may come across as unprofessional and be a poor reflection of the brand.
-
This came up in our company recently, too.
I personally dislike special characters in any web copy, be it page titles, meta descriptions, product descriptions, etc. Even though it's anecdotal, I tend to not click on any links with special characters.
I'm pretty interested to see whether testing proves me wrong, though.
-
I thought it was a useful answer, it's pretty much what I'd say.
I don't know of any studies into whether it improves CTR.
The sole skull & crossbones looks quite effective, but the descriptions and titles with the stars look spammy to me, so I probably wouldn't click them. I'd say be subtle, perhaps add something that might be enough to catch the eye without putting people off clicking. Remember Google can change the meta descriptions and titles if their algorithm deems they're not appropriate for the search - another reason not to go overboard.
I can see this getting to the stage where everyone in some SERPs has added a load of symbols to try and get noticed - that's when Google might add it as a negative ranking factor, or just not display descriptions and titles that use it.
-
Well, I don't think there is any denying that using special characters/symbols help anything stand out more. And while I cannot help you with any definitive answers, as I have not run any case-studies myself, I can tell you that people are becoming more sensitive to spammy looking sites and such within the SERP's.
With that said, if you choose to use any special characters within your title/meta tags, tread lightly, as preceding your actual site/page title with 5 moons or stars might look a little fishy to some.
But I agree, as an end-user, your eyes are definitely drawn to things that stand out first and foremost.
Last thing you'd want is to be ranked for a symbol by the major search engines.
Sorry, that probably not much help... just my 2 cents on the matter for what it's worth.
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
-
Changing Links to Spans with Robots.txt Blocked Redirects using Linkify/jQuery
Hi, I was recently penalized most likely because Google started following javascript links to bad neighborhoods that were not no-followed. The first thing I did was remove the Linkify plugin from my site so that all those links would disappear, but now I think I have a solution that works with Linkify without creating crawlable links. I did the following: I blocked access to the Linkify scripts using robots.txt so that Google won't execute the scripts that create the links. This has worked for me in the past with banner ads linking to other sites of mine. At least it appears to work because those sites did not get links from pages running those banners in search console. I created a /redirect/ directory that redirects all offsite URLs. I put a robots.txt block on this directory. I configured the Linkify plugin to parse URLs into span elements instead of a elements and add no follow attributes. They still have an href attribute, but the URLs in the href now point to the redirect directory and the span onclick event redirects the user. I have implemented this solution on another site of mine and I am hoping this will make it impossible for Google to categorize my pages as liking to any neighborhoods good or bad. Most of the content is UGC, so this should discourage link spam while giving users clickable URLs and still letting people post complaints about people that have profiles on adult websites. Here is a page where the solution has been implemented https://cyberbullyingreport.com/bully/predators-watch-owner-scott-breitenstein-of-dayton-ohio-5463.aspx, the Linkify plugin can be found at https://soapbox.github.io/linkifyjs/, and the custom jQuery is as follows: jQuery(document).ready(function ($) { 2 $('p').linkify({ tagName: 'span', attributes: { rel: 'nofollow' }, formatHref: function (href) { href = 'https://cyberbullyingreport.com/redirect/?url=' + href; return href; }, events:{ click: function (e) { var href = $(this).attr('href'); window.location.href = href; } } }); 3 });
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | STDCarriers0 -
White H1 Tag Hurting SEO?
Hi, We're having an issue with a client not wanting the H1 tag to display on their site and using an image of their logo instead. We made the H1 tag white (did not deliberately hide with CSS) and i just read an article where this is considered black hat SEO. https://www.websitemagazine.com/blog/16-faqs-of-seo The only reason we want to hide it is because it looks redundant appearing there along with the brand name logo. Does anyone have any suggestions? Would putting the brand logo image inside of an H1 tag be ok? Thanks for the help
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AliMac261 -
Keyword in alt tag and future G Updates
Hello, I notice that it is common practice to put the page's keywords directly into an alt tag. I don't see how this helps the user and how it helps the user using screen readers and such. Do you think future G updates will slightly penalize pages with alt tags that are just the page's keywords and not a helpful phrase? What do you recommend to put in alt tags in light of future G updates?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW1 -
I am experiencing referrer spam from http://r-e-f-e-r-e-r.com/ (don't click) - What should I do?
It amazes me that every day in search marketing is filled with something new that I don't know or never heard of. Most of you are probably familiar with referrer spam, but I hadn't ever heard of it before. I am currently experiencing referral spam on my personal blog. What's the best way to get rid of this pest? Shall I ignore them? Block them in my robots.txt file? Use Google's Disavow? or should I just plain holler "Curse you referral spam people!!!" ? Thanks all!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | danatanseo0 -
What's the right way to gain the benefits of an EMD but avoid cramming the title?
Hi Guys, Say I'm (completely hypothetically) building weddingvenuesnewyork.com and right now I'm organizing the tags for each page. What's the best layout so that I can optimize for "wedding venues new york" as much as possible without it becoming spammy. Right now I'm looking at something like "Wedding Venues New York: Wedding Receptions and Ceremony Venues" for the title.. To get other strong keywords in there too. Is there a better layout/structure?.. And is having the first words of the title on the homepage the same as the domain name going to strengthen the ranking for that term, or look spammy to Google and be a bad move? This is a new site being built
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | xcyte0 -
Can you use the image description for IMG ALT?
ello ello! We're running an ecommerce site with thousands of products. None of the product pages have an IMG ALT. We're been thinking about an IMG ALT rule to apply to all product page images. Every image currently has a detailed caption so the thought was, why don't we use the description as the IMG ALT? It's perfect as it explains the image. Now the thing is, the length of the description, some of them come to 150 - 200 characters with spaces. Do you think this is too much? Also, would having a caption and the IMG ALT be the same cause issues? Have you guys employed any rules for IMG ALT in a bulk way?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Some pages of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped crawling in Google
hi , i have 5 years old website and some page of my website http://goo.gl/1vGZv stopped indexing in Google . I have asked Google webmaster to remove low quality link via disavow tool . What to do ?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | unitedworld0 -
Index page de-indexed / banned ?
Yesterday google removed our index page from the results. Today they also removed language subdomains (fr.domain.com).. Index page, subdomains are not indexed anymore. Any suggestions? -- No messages in GWT. No malware. Backlink diversification was started in May. Never penguilized or pandalized. Last week had the record of all times of daily UV. Other pages still indexed and driving traffic, left around 40% of total. Never used any black SEO tool. 95% of backlinks are related; sidebar, footer links No changes made of index page for couple months.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bele0