Pipe ("|") in my website's title is being replaced with ":" in Google results

[Kadel]

Hi ,

One of the websites I'm promoting and working on is www.pau-brasil.co.il.
It's wordpress-based website and as you can see the html's Title is "PauBrasil | some hebrew slogan".
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/2f80EEY.gif)
When I'm searching for "PauBrasil" (Which is the brand's name) , one of the results google shows is

"PauBrasil: Some Hebrew Slogan" (Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/eJxNHrO.gif )

Why does the pipe is being replaced with ":" ?
And not just that , as you can see there's a "blank space" missing between the the ":" to the slogan.
(note: the websites has been indexed by google crawler at least 4 times so I find it hard to believe it can be the reason)

I've keep on looking and found out that there's another page in that website with the exact same title
but when I'm looking for it in google , it shows the title as it really is , with pipe. ("|").
(Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/dtsbZV2.gif)

Have you ever encountered something like that?
Can it be that the duplicated title cause that weird "replacement"?

Thanks in advance,
Kadel

[Kadel]

Hi Christy ,Sorry for the delay.

I can't be 100% sure (after all it's Google) but here's what I did.
On the homepage I've changed the title into this format:
brand name + "|" + slogan with keyword
while on the rest of the pages I have not changed the title and left it in the following format: Page's Title + "|" + Brand name After that , this website's title results appeared as above , without ":" or re-position of the brand in the title.

Hope it will help.

[Christy-Correll]

Hi Kadel, what is the current status of this issue? Any updates to report? Cheers, Christy

[FedeEinhorn]

I experience different results: when the brand name is in front on the title like "Brand - Tag Line" and you search for "tag line" google modifies the title to "Tag Line: Brand" which is quite annoying for me.

I tested for a couple of month "Brand - Tag Line 1 | Tag Line 2" and searching for "tag line" didn't produced any title change, yet I hate the way the pipe looks on the title, so we decided to move back to "Brand - Tag Line" and well, stand whatever google decides to modify.

[Francisco_Meza]

In Adwords the | (pipe) is not allowed in ads anymore. Maybe this is the case for organic too. You can use a - (dash) though and you should be good to go.

[Kadel]

I believe I've found the answer so I'm posting it here for anyone else who would like to know:

There don’t appear to be any examples of colon insertion if the brand name is already at the front of the page title. This is interesting since when Google decides to tweak the titles as above, it removes the dash or the pipe and replaces these with a colon. However if the brand name is already at the front, Google is happy to leave the dash or the pipe in.

From: http://socialmediatoday.com/georgestevens48/1317336/google-rewriting-page-titles-time-brand

I am about to change the brand name to Hebrew so it will be in front of the page title so I'll be able to confirm it.
Will update you with the results.