★ Using a star in your title

Saw a site do it and am in two minds of trying it myself

[alxdean]

saw it and loved the idea. the html code is: ★ and when I saw a website use it I thought I was flipping. OK, the title on the web browser shows an empty box as it is not meant to decypher HTML codes but obviously Google picks up on it.
I read and reread the google guidelines and can't find anything in there telling me I can't use html characters in my title, well it might clash with

"Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

but hey, SEO is not black and white. so where is the grey line.
the biggest fear I have is that my competition will pick up on the fact and start doing the same. would be a shame!

so what is the general consent? use it while it is still allowed or stay away from such "cheeky" tactics?

[rfgdxm1]

Shouldn't hurt with Google. However, do you know how other SEs might handle this?

[sudden]

I recently found some results where the titles started with bullet points. Dunno, does it help? A star might look like an "official" special result. I think Google will go after it, if many people start using it.

[mayday9]

alexdean,

your competition probably follows this forum too, so you just taught them:)

[trillianjedi]

A star might look like an "official" special result. I think Google will go after it, if many people start using it.

Hmmm..... very nice for the google listing (as you say, looks like an official special result), but I think it's against googles TOS as it won't display in the title bar. So what is it there for? To get an "official" looking special result in search engines.

Nice find though.

TJ

[Radiolabs]

What even works better is &Omega; or my personal favorites, &spades; or &hearts;. Just about all of them work as long as you put it in the Title line right after the <title>&Spades; Your title here </title>

I also tried it on 2 search engine spider emulators and it worked great. That's what suprised me.

I don't think I will try it though because it might change my title search positioning.... don't like messing with that stuff too much!

If anyone has the nerve to try it, let me know how it works :)

[too much information]

I'll try it, but on a secondary page or two. I'll let you know what happens, might be kinda fun.

I will say this though, if it does show in the serps, I'm pulling it so that my competators don't try to use it too.

[Radiolabs]

I know... I thought I would try it also. Try using search engine world's spider simulator. It actually shows up in the title page, no problem. Interesting that alot of other people haven't done that also.

I tried it on one of my back pages, now I just have to wait till I get a crawl again and re-indexed.

I think I will remove it also when the test is complete.

Fortunately, I don't have much competition :)

[MonkeeSage]

&Omega;

Greek people will probably wonder why you have an uncial of the last letter of the alphabet in your title, though. It would be like seeing a page with "Z - Marty's House of Widgets"? Then again, might get some people to look just because they are curious what in the world it's there for.

Jordan

[Nicke]

I have seen that on many websites lately when I Google search, althought I didnt bother to found out how to do it.

It looks nice and "special" in Google results.

[TheDave]

I'm going to try it on my personal site, maybe not a star, but I like the idea :) If google's going to start taking a stance on this, I hope it's one of just removing the character from the serps! ;)

[MonkeeSage]

TheDave:

I've used entities in the titles of my personal sites before, and never seen any difference. I think as long as they are valid character entities, there is no problem.

The one's I've used are from the math characters,
&infin;
&nabla;
&prop;
&asymp;

Here [w3.org] is a full list of entities to choose from. :)

Jordan

[TheDave]

Cool, thanks :) I have gone with a math symbol too :) square root cause it looks like a tick :)

[mogwai]

I've seen more and more sites starting to use this technique lately to stand out from other sites. I can see this becoming the norm in many serps, searchers will have to start looking for the only listing without a star :)

I can't see Google letting this get out of hand, to many people it will look like a Google seal of approval.

[thewebboy]

I have a little search engine and I saw a little site doing this, so I decided to just htmlencode the title, now it doesn't work and I see google doing something similar.

[Radiolabs]

Monkeesage (Jordan),

I own an electronic engineering firm and omega is a very common symbol for ohm, or resistance. So, therefore, Omega is an excellent symbol for my site. God bless the Greeks!

Kinda makes perfect sense!

It works also! I added it to the site. I will just have to wait for the crawl and I'll let you know what happens!

Take Care,

Chris

[msr986]

These entities DO NOT display on my IE browser.

I am running IE6.0.2800.1106

They show up as a small square.

Other more common entities such as &bull; show up fine.

Beware....

[msr986]

-dupe-

[MonkeeSage]

msr986:

Are you talking about the hex codes like the in in the title of this thread, or the standard character entities?

The standard entities seem to work OK for me (I'm testing with build 2800.1106 also). Try putting this in the address bar and see if the character shows up correctly:

javascript:document.write("<span>&infin;</span>");

You should see a little infinity sign.

Jordan

[percentages]

So you think people actually look at the Title Tag in SERPs then?

[rfgdxm1]

I just checked and &bull; in the title works OK with IE, Opera and Mozilla. Thus, no reasonable way Google could think that improper. The question I have is while Google may accept these in titles, what about other search engines? Google isn't the only search engine out there. If MSN or Alltheweb were to choke on a &bull; in the title, this would be a Bad Thing.

[alxdean]

wow, I didn't expect all these replies. I trie d it out on ym site and with google's new update cycle, which I am beginning to love, I had great results. But then I panicked. What if evreybody would do it? what is google going to do against it?

so I changed it back to the one without yesterday and voilla google now has the version from yesterday indexed. How it managed to do that so fast is a mystery. I know google is updating on the fly but 24 hours there and 24 hours back again is too good to be true.

What I did notice is no change in the SERPS at all. But then the keywords in question were not very competitive.

[alxdean]

mayday9
i am aware that my competition might be lurking around here too, doubt it though as I'm a small player in a small field. But once the serps fill up with special codes, the competition is going to pick up on it anyway. okay, I can cloak it out of the page but the google cache can't be fooled.

percentages,
I look at the title and not because of SEO. so I always try to make the title sound good and also is important if people want to bookmark your page. nothing worse than having a tilte in your favourites and have to decypher it months later.

[MonkeeSage]

The W3C entities are valid HTML, just like having &nbsp; in your page title. Nothing to be concerned about, imo. Worst case scenario, Google shows you in ther SERPs like "&infini; Bob's House of Widgets." I've never heard of them penalizing or filtering or anything like that. It's just HTML, like any other entity. :)

Jordan

[MonkeeSage]

Radiolabs:

Didn't see your comments! Seems the Omega is a perfect fit in such a case. Very nice. :)

Jordan

[rfgdxm1]

>Worst case scenario, Google shows you in ther SERPs like "&infini; Bob's House of Widgets." I've never heard of them penalizing or filtering or anything like that. It's just HTML, like any other entity. :)

I'm not worried about Google, but how other search engines will list that? It would clearly be improper for Google to penalize, because as you say this is just HTML, and browsers do handle a &infini; perfectly well.

[Nicke]

I added a star to one of my pages and I saw today that FAST (alltheweb) also show these entities.

[too much information]

Well, IE5 for the Mac doesn't show the star, just a question mark, but Safari shows it just fine, without the javascript.

Looks pretty cool as a matter of fact. But after my next crawl I will probably take it down. There's only so much foolishness that I really want to try.

[msr986]

For me, &bull works but the &infin entity suggested in post number 19 does not.

[stevenjm]

It may be ok for a less competetive search term. But for the competetive search terms there is no way I would risk diluting my title tags - even by one character.

Hope everyone does start using it because the ones that do not will be that one character of dillution better off and be above them in the results.