I usually use commas as option separators, etc. But when pixel width is limited, sometimes the extra 3 or 4 characters comes in handy for things like Blue/Red/Black/White instead of Blue, Red, Black, White.

The specific example I had in mind in the OP (Awesome Product - OptionA/OptionB/OptionC available), I was actually thinking of a category page I'm working on and not a product (I realise now my choice of example title was confusing).

Originally, category structure was this:

Awesome Product

• OptionA

• Lots of products

• OptionB

• Lots of products

• OptionC

• Lots of products

• etc

But subcategories have been noticeably slipping over the past year, and I've attributed this down to the landing pages cannibalising each other. So I'm in the process of flattening the whole category and using filters to separate the different product options, and working on strengthening the main category page to accommodate all user search patterns. While drafting a new title for the category page to incorporate the deleted subcategories, I was just curious how Google treats the forward slashes as I'm usually a comma person too. And whether it makes a difference at all to Google.

**TL;DR: **I'll probably stick with the commas because it does look more readable for users, just wondering how Google reads characters like that and whether it extracts the separate keywords OptionA/OptionB/OptionC.

Seems like a stupid question, but one that I never really gave much thought about before. How exactly does Google treat special characters in titles? Do they all get seen as spaces?

e.g. Does

Awesome Product - OptionA/OptionB/OptionC available

get seen the same way as

**Awesome Product - OptionA, OptionB, **OptionC available

? Or even

**Awesome Product - OptionA OptionB **OptionC available

? Or will Google see the first title as **OptionA/OptionB/OptionC **being a whole "keyword" due to there being no space between them? Like I've always just assumed that with apostrophised words will be seen as keyword s. And when using commas, there's always a space after the comma anyway. Are all "special characters" treated the same?

If the <a></a><a>tag includes _target="blank" then the link will open in a new window/tab, if that helps at all.</a>

Maybe something to do with this:

http://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-search-analytics-data-delayed-but-google-is-working-on-a-fix-236374

Google are apparently working to fix the bug in Search Console with Search Analytics data, which would affect Google Analytics.

"An Update on the Search Analytics report in Google Search console

Data have been missing in Search Analytics since November 12th.

The team is aware of it and currently working on a fix.

It should be back to normal by the end of the week."

If you're seeing (not set), I suspect this might be the explanation:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-analytics-seo-report-not-set-is-not-a-bug-21102.html

"In Search Analytics if you look at the numbers of the queries that you see there, you will sometimes see that we show a top aggregated, maybe a hundred queries, and in a table below if you add the numbers together, you might see 70 queries or something like that.

And the difference there is essentially queries that we filter out, and in Search Console we don’t show them separately and in Google Analytics they chose to call them Not Set.

So that is what you are seeing there, not something completely different, its not showing the difference that you’d have to calculate yourself."

Unless, they've changed things up again.

This answers sooo many of my questions. Thanks, Rand!

But if pages 2/3/etc are displaying duplicate content from your actual blog posts, then why would you want the paginated pages indexed by Google?

Ask yourself: what do I expect people to Google to land on page 2 of my blog, and would I rather they land on a blog post instead? If the pages 2/3/etc provide no value to searchers and only serve as navigation for users, why confuse Google by keeping them indexed?

@Moz has tweeted back on the matter saying "The update is live, but it has not rolled out across all campaigns yet. That process takes hours."

In terms of a Google penalty, you have nothing to worry about.

However if you are providing false information about the competitor or writing negatively about them, I'd be more concerned about their response rather than Google's. If not, no worries!

This shouldn't be too much of an issue at all really.

My recommendation would be to noindex these /page/2 etc pages if you're using Wordpress. Various Wordpress plugins are available that allow you to do this easily. My favourite is Yoast SEO - you can noindex those pages and tag pages too. If you use tags, this would be more of an SEO concern than the paginated pages.

According to https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ it has already been updated on 15th October, with next update due 15th November.

EDIT: Though the OSE homepage and Mozscape Updates log (https://moz.com/products/api/updates) says that it has been updated, I'm finding now too that all my campaigns' DAs are unchanged and still displaying same +/- stats as before. Testing different URLs on OSE too, doesn't seem as if any DA or PA has changed since August update.

Would be great for a Mozzer to let us know what's actually going on here...