• symbol in title tag
-
We have a few title tags with a circular dot symbol, which is created by the code "•"
Humans see a dot, but googlebot sees •
Does this negatively impact our SEO, or is googlebot aware that **• == *** to human eyes
-
Hey Graeme
I am unsure of any specific guidelines with regards to HTML special characters but I would tend to keep my page titles to the agreed and safe characters. In this instance, the page title is totally fine but ascii has been abused in page titles in years gone by to create more catchy looking SERP listings.
(¯
'·.¸(¯
'·.¸Free X !!! Click Here !!!¸.·'´¯)¸.·'´¯)You may find a variety of things happen and your titles get rewritten.
One other point or perspective - you mention that Googlebot sees the ascii code but a human sees the bullet character. Well, where? How does your SERP listing look? If the page title in the search engine results looks like this:
My Product • Category | Site Name
Then, I would say that is a pretty good reason to do away with the special characters.
If this was me, I would keep it simple, stick with the best practices and make do with standard characters to break up your title tags: - | etc.
Some links that may help:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624
Hope that helps!
Marcus
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
-
International SEO - Hreflang tags and URL Structure
Hello, I wonder if any SEO internationalisation experts can help. We are a UK centric business with a .com domain which all our traffic currently goes to. We have been growing in the US and are therefore looking to internationalise our website by building out some US pages using the subfolder .com/us. Since the keywords we wish to target in the US are different to the keywords we are targeting elsewhere, when implementing hreflang tags is it possible to use a different URL for the US page? So let’s say we are targeting ‘estate car’ generally but want to target ’station wagon’ as the keyword for the equivalent US page, can the URLs be different? Example: General page: www.example.com/estate-car US: www.example.com/us/station-wagon Hreflang tags: Would that be the correct implementation? Any help or guidance would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | SEOCT0 -
ALT tags - How important are they?
I realise ALT tags are important from an accessibility perspective but in terms of organic search, do they carry much value? I have a big site and it doesn't look like ALT tags have been added generally, it would be a massive job to fix and I'm just trying to weigh up what to concentrate on first. Does anybody have any real life experience?
Technical SEO | | seoman100 -
Weird Blog tags and re-directs
Hello fellow Digital Marketeers! As an in-house kinda guy, I rarely get to audit sites other than my own. But, I was tasked with auditing another. So I ran it through Screaming Frog and the usual tools. I got a couple of URLs come back with timeout messages, so I checked them manually- they're apparently part of a blog's archive: http://www.bestpracticegroup.com/tag/training-2/ I click 'read more' and it takes you to: http://www.bestpracticegroup.com/pfi-contracts-3-myth-busters-to-help-achieve-savings/ The first URL seems entirely redundant. Has anyone else seen something like this? Just an explanation as to why something like that would exist, and how you'd handle that would be grand! Much appreciated, John.
Technical SEO | | Muhammad-Isap0 -
Hiding h1 tags in Magento
Hi Moz Community, I know that hiding h1 tags isn't a good practice for SEO and google, but we have banners that look much nicer than the stock text Magento uses for its titles. The banners have the same text and the h1 is in the source code, just not visible on front end. The option Magento gives is "hide title on the page." So I'm not sure if this is actually the bad way to hide it or if it's fine for search engines. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
When do I change out my meta tags after a full website revamp?
We're creating a new version of our entire website - look and feel is completely different, though core functionality and results are the same. Just cleaner, faster.. etc. We're doing a temp redirect to the temporary url for testing and to slow roll the release to some of our users for a more friendly approach. Eventually, the new look and feel will be under the original url. I've researched best practices for the site transfer, including "make sure the meta tags for title and description are exactly the same". The concern I have is that Moz Analytics is detecting a lot of errors in the existing meta tags. They're too long, have changed and become inconsistent after being passed through different hands, & some have some keyword stuffing in there. I have plans to change them out and really clean them up... I'm just wondering, when is the best time to do that? Since the tags are bad, should I just do it now but make sure that the old and new are matching? Or should I wait (and for how long?) after the new site is switched over and everything is on the original URL?
Technical SEO | | SFMoz0 -
Are Tags in Blogs good?
Hi Is adding tags into Blogs a good idea? Does it help with SEO at all? For example blog/?tag=/Invoicing-Software Will that help us get ranked for Invoicing Software? Regards Andrew
Technical SEO | | Studio330 -
Navigation links tagged as H3
I'm reviewing a website that has used the H3 tag in the Navigation Menu. I've not seen that before and first thought is it is a dodgy. Tags should relate to content on the page not link to another page. As a result of using H3 in Nav the ratio of content wrapped in Heading tags vs body content is quite high. My recommendation is to remove H3 tag from Nav but having searched Moz and not finding an article to verify that recommendation thought I'd ask the question.
Technical SEO | | NicDale0 -
Schema Tags Configuration - Ecommerce Category Pages
I'm semi confident that some schema tags are implemented correctly on our ecommerce category pages.. but I would just like to double check. An example url http://www.freshcargo.co.uk/shoes I have just fixed some errors using the Google rich snippets tool... but the thing I'm not sure about is why the prices are being displayed as seperate items Eg: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freshcargo.co.uk%2Fshoes&view= Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | edwardlewis0