Attention-grabbing symbols in Title

Are they legal?

[crobb305]

I have seen a couple of sites listed in serps who have encoded a bold arrow head into their title tag (at the far left so that it points to the right toward the title). This effectively grabs the surfers attention and may increase click through rates. Would Google deem this inappropriate? It looks very effective.

C

[kaled]

This was discussed some time ago. I thought I'd read that Google was filtering out these chars (but I could be mistaken). I'm probably blind but I've never noticed them.

Report it to Google - they might eventually get round to fixing it.

Kaled.

[jcoronella]

A couple?! These symbols are out of hand. I'm surprised they are not being filtered out on any of the search engines.

[skipfactor]

>>Would Google deem this inappropriate?

When some joker puts 54 across the screen perhaps. I continue to see them sporadically & threw a few up on some for-fun pages that I wouldn't mind losing.

Caveat: it may stand out to the user, but it also screams 'SEO' gang member like a jailhouse tatoo.

[crobb305]

but it also screams 'SEO' gang member like a jailhouse tatoo.

excellent point. I am surprised the sites I see using the symbols rank so high. Would love to increase click-through but sounds like a bad bad way to do it given all the SEO-penalty talk right now.

[rfgdxm1]

At worst, Google should just filter this out. It isn't really inappropriate. And, if Google does think so, the can easily filter.

[mrwhy2k]

I have a gambling/poker related site and I put a Club Symbol next to my title. I don't see how this would be "inappropriate" in any way.

My guess is that Google will take care of this shortly, but in the meantime you should take advantage of the circumstances and get a higher clickthru rate.