Improve CTR with Special Characters in Meta-Description / Title Tags

[inhouseninja]

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:

http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2011/04/13/special-characters-in-meta-descriptions-the-beboisation-of-google/

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.

http://www.seosmarty.com/special-symbols-wingdings-for-social-media-branding-twitter-linkedin-google-plus/

[SemZoom]

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.

[Ryan-Ricketts]

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.

[Alex-Harford]

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.

[THB]

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.