Does the use of a unicode character high up on page adversely affect SEO?

[andrewddc]

I work for a company in the travel industry and we are currently in the process of building out a 360-degree video landing page to inspire travel to our destination. There is some desire from individuals on my team to use the unicode degree symbol ( ° ) after 360 to ensure clarity.

We currently have the ° symbol in the Page Title and H1 tag. Does the use of a unicode character adversely affect SEO? Our concern is that it is very unlikely that people are searching for 360-degree videos using the unicode symbol. We also have it fully written out as well. Just want to make sure we won't get dinged for this.

Thanks!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Completely agree, just 1 character might not influence anything. Search engines are very well able to understand what that specific character means in the context if you add 360 next to it.

[benesmartin]

Hey there,

Unicode characters are exactly like any other character in any other encoding. It won't hurt your ranking in any way.

However, make sure that it actually help you somehow. I guess that most people don't even know how to write the "degree" symbol. Maybe you can make some space in the title by replacing this character with a different keyword?

Cheers, Martin