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
-
Do we get de-indexed for changing some content and tags frequently? What is the scope in 2017?
Hi all, We are making some changes in our website content at some paragraphs and tags with our main keywords. I'm just wondering if this is going to make us de indexed from Google? Because we recently dropped in rankings when we added some new content; so I am worried whether there are any chances it will turn more risky when we try to make anymore changes like changing the content. There are actually many reasons a website gets de indexed from Google but we don't employ any such black hat techniques. Our website got a reputation with thousands of direct traffic and organic search. However I am curious to know what are the chances of getting de indexed as per the new trends at Google? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How does Google handle product detail page links hiden in a <noscript>tag?</noscript>
Hello, During my research of our website I uncovered that our visible links to our product detail pages (PDP) from grid/list view category-nav/search pages are <nofollowed>and being sent through a click tracking redirect with the (PDP) appended as a URL query string. But included with each PDP link is a <noscript>tag containing the actual PDP link. When I confronted our 3rd party e-commerce category-nav/search provider about this approach here is the response I recieved:</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">The purpose of these links is to firstly allow us to reliably log the click and then secondly redirect the visitor to the target PDP.<br /> In addition to the visible links there is also an "invisible link" inside the no script tag. The noscript tag prevents showing of the a tag by normal browsers but is found and executed by bots during crawling of the page.<br /> Here a link to a blog post where an SEO proved this year that the noscript tag is not ignored by bots: <a href="http://www.theseotailor.com.au/blog/hiding-keywords-noscript-seo-experiment/" target="_blank">http://www.theseotailor.com.au/blog/hiding-keywords-noscript-seo-experiment/<br /> </a> <br /> So the visible links are not obfuscating the PDP URL they have it encoded as it otherwise cannot be passed along as a URL query string. The plain PDP URL is part of the noscript tag ensuring discover-ability of PDPs by bots.</p> <p>Does anyone have anything in addition to this one blog post, to substantiate the claim that hiding our links in a <noscript> tag are in fact within the SEO Best Practice standards set by Google, Bing, etc...? </p> <p>Do you think that this method skirts the fine line of grey hat tactics? Will google/bing eventually penalize us for this?</p> <p>Does anyone have a better suggestion on how our 3rd party provider could track those clicks without using a URL redirect & hiding the actual PDP link?</p> <p>All insights are welcome...Thanks!</p> <p>Jordan K.</p></noscript></nofollowed>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | eImprovement-SEO0 -
Cloaking/Malicious Code
Does anybody have any experience with software for identifying this sort of thing? I was informed by a team we are working with that our website may have been compromised and I wanted to know what programs people have used to identify cloaking attempts and/or bad code. Thanks everybody!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Should I delete Meta Keywords from a website?
Hi Guys, I've been reading various posts on the Q&A section here at Moz about Meta keywords. I understand that meta keywords are not relevant with Google and that Bing signals this as spam. I'm optimising existing websites which already have meta keywords in the html coding. My question is: If I delete ALL meta keyword coding will this have any negative impact whatsoever? Thanks Mozers Jason 🙂
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Grant-Westfield0 -
Rel Noindex Nofollow tag vs meta noindex nofollow
Hi Mozzers I have a bit of thing I was pondering about this morning and would love to hear your opinion on it. So we had a bit of an issue on our client's website in the beginning of the year. I tried to find a way around it by using wild cards in my robots.txt but because different search engines treat wild cards differently it dint work out so well and only some search engines understood what I was trying to do. so here goes, I had a parameter on a big amount of URLs on the website with ?filter being pushed from the database we make use of filters on the site to filter out content for users to find what they are looking for much easier, concluding to database driven ?filter URLs (those ugly &^% URLs we all hate so much*. So what we looking to do is implementing nofollow noindex on all the internal links pointing to it the ?filter parameter URLs, however my SEO sense is telling me that the noindex nofollow should rather be on the individual ?filter parameter URL's metadata robots instead of all the internal links pointing the parameter URLs. Am I right in thinking this way? (reason why we want to put it on the internal links atm is because the of the development company states that they don't have control over the metadata of these database driven parameter URLs) If I am not mistaken noindex nofollow on the internal links could be seen as page rank sculpting where as onpage meta robots noindex nofolow is more of a comand like your robots.txt Anyone tested this before or have some more knowledge on the small detail of noindex nofollow? PS: canonical tags is also not doable at this point because we still in the process of cleaning out all the parameter URLs so +- 70% of the URLs doesn't have an SEO friendly URL yet to be canonicalized to. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks, Chris Captivate.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DROIDSTERS0 -
Herbal Viagra page same DA/PA as UC Berkeley??
Either there is some amazingly good SEO work going on here, or Google has an amazingly large hole in their metrics. http://nottowait.com/ http://www.ucdavis.edu/index.html The "nottowait" page has a PA of 85?! and a DA of 82?! The page is HORRIBLE. The page itself is an image of another page. The nav bar does not function, nor does any of the "click here" links. At the bottom there is a paragraph of keywords and broken english. This page is pure junk and should simply not have any value at all with respect to DA nor PA. It has a ton of incoming links from various sources which seem to be the source of all this value, which it passes on to other pages. This page really is an affront to the "content is king" concept. I suppose I should ask a question but all I can think of is, what is Matt Cutts' phone number? I want to ask him how this page has gotten away with being ranked so well for so long.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RyanKent0 -
Would linking out to a gambling/casino site, harm my site and the other sites it links out to?
I have been emailed asking if I sell links on one of my sites. The person wants to link out to slotsofvegas[dot]com or similar. Should I be concerned about linking out to this and does it reduce the link value to any of the other sites that the site links out to? Thanks, Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Markus1111