Hyphen or mdash and the Google SERPs

An explanation why it went wrong for me

[huulbaek]

After having been a #1 site for a year, we suddenly dropped to #2xx for main keywords. For a couple of months I have been trying hard to make little changes to figure out why it happened - Google kept coming back everyday, and I simply couldn't figure it out.

The last change I made was to exchange our — in title-tag (like "Company name — the premier company of ...") with a normal "-".

We almost immediately jumped to #4. Now, I'm not 100% sure this was the cause of it, but I figure it's almost certain.

[millie]

Does anyone have any experiences to back this up?

Thanks for your insight huulbaek

[the_nerd]

We almost immediately jumped to #4. Now, I'm not 100% sure this was the cause of it, but I figure it's almost certain.

well, there is a way to make sure, but you probably wouldn't like to ;)

But - could you try and reproduce it with another page that's not so important for you?

[huulbaek]

;) - unfortunately, all my pages seem dead-important. But I'll try to look more into it.

[mars9820]

As I remember before people were changing the titles to show a star as the first character which gave them a "cool" standout in the search engine. The code of star was quite similar since it is &.... (sorry I forgot the code).

Suddenly this hype was gone and most likely google took action about that. (this was about 2 or 3 months ago I believe but you can search the google forum). I remember that those pages were suddenly completely gone out of the SERPS and ending up in the 2xx or 3xx regions.

[huulbaek]

Yes, I remember this star-business too - which is why I eventually made the change, as sort of a last hope. I just didn't seriously consider this to be a factor, since it didn't really make the result stand out... or maybe it did, just a little.. ;)