Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Commas in Meta Title and Description Okay?
-
Hey there guys, have heard some recent information from some experts that utilizing commas in headings, meta titles or descriptions is not good for ranking. Can you guys please shed some light on this?
Thank you!
-
Alick300, Thank you. That was the true evidence straight from the Google source that validates this question my client had! Thank you again.
-
Hi Josh,
No absolutely not . We can use comma or pipes, dashes as a separator in meta title, description or heading but not underscore. You can also watch below video to know more.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHSqLYUPq8w
Thanks
-
Within titles a comma is often seen as wasted space since the character count is so limited, but sites with them in their title still rank, see: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=lions%20tigers%20bears. Headings tend to be as short as titles which is probably what dictates comma usage more than anything. Meta Descriptions using commas are fine and fairly common since they're written with less space constraints as the above.
Do you have the source on where you heard this first? Would be interesting to see how they're discussing it. Cheers!
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
-
Problems with Meta Title on Bing
On the Bing search engine, it isn't showing the actual meta title we have for a website. It's showing something different. However, the correct meta title is showing on the Google search engine. Has anyone had the same issue? Has anyone been able to fix this issue? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Harrison.Stickboy0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Titles from Weebly Blog
Anyone familiar with Weebly that can offer some suggestions? I ran a crawl diagnostics on my site and have some high priority issues that appear to stem from Weebly Blog posts. There are several of them and it appears that the post is being counted as "page content" on the main blog feed and then again when it is tagged to a category. I hope this makes sense, I am new to SEO and this is really confusing. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | CRMI0 -
Title Tag vs. H1 / H2
OK, Title tag, no problem, it's the SEO juice, appears on SERP, etc. Got it. But I'm reading up on H1 and getting conflicting bits of information ... Only use H1 once? H1 is crucial for SERP Use H1s for subheads Google almost never looks past H2 for relevance So say I've got a blog post with three sections ... do I use H1 three times (or does Google think you're playing them ...) Or do I create a "big" H1 subhead and then use H2s? Or just use all H2s because H1s are scary? 🙂 I frequently use subheads, it would seem weird to me to have one a font size bigger than another, but of course I can adjust that in settings ... Thoughts? Lisa
Technical SEO | | ChristianRubio0 -
Why is Google replacing our title tags with URLs in SERP?
Hey guys, We've noticed that Google is replacing a lot of our title tags with URLs in SERP. As far as we know, this has been happening for the last month or so and we can't seem to figure out why. I've attached a screenshot for your reference. What we know: depending on the search query, the title tag may or may not be replaced. this doesn't seem to have any connection to the relevance of the title tag vs the url. results are persistent on desktop and mobile. the length of the title tag doesn't seem to correlate with the replacement. the replacement is happening at mass, to dozens of pages. Any ideas as to why this may be happening? Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | Mobify
Peter mobify-site-www.mobify.com---Google-Search.png0 -
Missing meta descriptions from Google SERPs
Hullo all, I run an e-commerce website and hence have a lot of product category/sub-category pages to handle. Despite giving each of these category pages meta descriptions, in the Google SERPs, a lot of these descriptions don't show up fully. Rather, only half the text that I'd inputed as my meta desc. shows up; the other half has generic stuff from that page given. I've attached a screen shot to give you an example of what comes up in the SERPs. Could you please tell me what exactly is the problem? Is it a coding issue? Or has Google not crawled that page? Need help asap! Thank you in advance! aE9RKXJ
Technical SEO | | suchde0 -
The word 'shop' in a page title
I'm reworking most of the page titles on our site and I'm considering the use of the word 'Shop' before a product category. ex. Shop 'keyword' | Brand Name As opposed to just using the keyword sans 'Shop.' Some of the keywords are very generic, especially for a top level category page. Question: Is the word 'Shop' damaging my SEO efforts in any way?
Technical SEO | | rhoadesjohn0 -
Why has Google removed meta descriptions from SERPS?
One of my clients' sites has just been redesigned with lots of new URLs added. So the 301 redirections have been put in place and most of the new URLs have now been indexed. BUT Google is still showing all the old URLs in the SERPS and even worse it only displays the title tag. The meta description is not shown, no rich snippet, no text, nothing below the title. This is proving disastrous as visitors are not clicking on a result with no description. I have to assume its got something to do with the redirection, but why is it not showing the descriptions? I've checked the old URLs and he meta description is definitely still in the code, but Google is choosing not to show it. I've never seen this before so I'm struggling for an answer. I'd like to know why or how this is happening, and if it can be resolved. I realise that this may be resolved when Google stops showing all the old URLs but there's no telling how long that will take (can it be speeded up?)
Technical SEO | | Websensejim0 -
Use of Meta Tag - MSSmartTagsPreventParsing
We've inherited some sites from another developer that had the following tag: All references I can find to it are from 2004. What is the purpose and is it worth including in pages/sites we build?
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0