Bad SEO Practice: in title tag?

[Eric_Lifescript]

Greetings,

I just discovered that some of our content was produced with
tags in the title tag.

Example: <title>Diabetes Symptoms <br> In Women Over 40</title>

My gut says this is bad for SEO, but I couldn't find a definitive answer on the web, so I thought I would ask the community of gurus here at Moz. Thanks in advance for any reply.

Kind regards,

Eric

[MattAntonino]

I love the way you phrase things. lol

I agree with EGOL here - it's definitely not helpful, it's definitely not needed, it could be harmful, and it's a sign of other potential issues. I would definitely work to remove it from the title.

Plus,
.... I mean what's it trying to accomplish? This tells me it's auto-generated or (stealing EGOL's word) "dumb." because it's a line break. You can't line break a title. I mean I could see some example of code that are meant to do something in a title (for instance, **for bold) but not BR? It makes no sense. **

[EGOL]

If I see code in a title tag, I will know that a dumb programmer worked on that site.  It tells me that there could be other surprises waiting inside.

So, I will not click into that site.  I will skip over it.

If
was in the titel tags of one of my sites we would do whatever is needed to get it out of there.  We would work for an entire week to get rid of it because we don't want to be in the SERPs with our pants down.

[4RS_John]

Like Mary, I'm not a guru, but don't think it'll harm your SEO, but:

• What does Google display for these sites? If the
  is displaying in search results, that's 4 of your precious characters wasted that could be used to convince people to click on your site.
• What do browsers do when they encounter a
  in a title tag? It might get kind of ugly up in the tab or title bar.

TL;DR: If you can get rid of them I would.

[RevolutionMary]

Well I'm no Guru -but it seems to me like the
is unnecessary. I don't think it is harmful to search, but visually if that
is appearing on your browser tabs/search results it'll look odd to the user so I guess in that sense it's not great.

MOZ has a great write up on best title tag practices for SEO, and they give the optimal format as:

Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

If it were my content I would probably change it, just to be safe. Hope this helps.