Comma in title makes the difference?

[silverbytes]

Experts please:

#1 in some google search title is:

widgets in city, key1 key2

#8 in some google search title is:

widgets in city region country, key1 key2

I´m trying to figure out if in the title the comma is making the difference. I think so...
What do you say?

[pmac]

Nope, a comma in the title is not going to make make a difference as to one site out ranking another.

[Robert Charlton]

silverbytes - I'm not sure what the search is, so I don't exactly know how to answer your question... but I'm guessing that what you're observing has to do with proximity.

By adding "region country" you're separating the words "widgets" and "city" from "key1" and "key2." If the search were, say, for...

widgets key1

...this separation would make the first title do better (for this search) than the second one. Again, from your question, I can't tell what the search is, and I don't know what's actually on your page, and what's pointing to your page... and all these things have an effect as well.

[silverbytes]

The search phrase was:

widgets in city

in fact was a ´a-service in name-of-a-city´ I guess the comma is making the difference there, I don´t know if it has something to do with proximity..

[Marcia]

"in" is making a difference.

[silverbytes]

No.

The #1 result is

widgets in city, bla bla

and the #8 is

widgets in city bla bla, bla

Both uses ´widgets in city´ and the search term is ´widgets in city´....

So is comma making difference or not?

[piskie]

Some time ago I heard someone express a very slight suspicion that within the Title Tag and possibly Description Tag that the comma acted as a stop. At the time I reasoned that this could not be counted out as some DB functions use a comma as a field separator.

Since then I have omitted commas from ALL Meta Tags. Reasoning that if the suspicion was true then it was a good thing and if the suspicion was not true then there was little or no harm done.

If anyone has proof one way or the other it would be useful

[KevinC]

i think its a bit of a stretch to say that a little comma is making the difference between #1 postion and a #8 position.

With so many other factors involded its gotta be almost impossible say for sure.

I know of sites that rank very well for terms that don't even appear on the page let alone title. They do appear in the backlinks though.

My money is on some other factor - but then again I'm no expert either.

[Mark_A]

silverbytes you fail to measure and mention other factors ...

for example to give some background to the comparison

What are the Google page ranks of the homepages of the two sites ..

How many contents pages in each
How many inward links
How many contents pages containing the keyword
How many links inside the site using the keyword in the link text

etc etc

then come back to see if the title comma seems to be a significant difference....

[takagi]

A comma is usually ignored by Google. Google will only in special cases treat characters like apostrophe (') period (.) comma (,) and hyphen (-) in a different way than a space.

Searching for mother's [google.com] will give less hits than mother s [google.com] .

Searching for 3.14 [google.com] will give less hits than "3 14" [google.com].

Searching for 12,345 [google.com] will also show pages that contain 12345.

Searching for week-end [google.com] will also show pages that contain 'weekend'.

Also dollar is treated in a special way. Searching $5 [google.com] will only give pages with a dollar immediately before a '5'. However searching for ¥5 [google.com] will show all pages with a '5'.

None of them have any meaning if at the end of a word. You will find the same result for mothers' [google.com], mothers, [google.com] and mothers [google.com].

If the one ranking #8 has one or more extra words in the title, then that fact is much more important than the comma.

After all, 3 words ('widgets in city') out of 5 words is a 60% match, and 3 words out of 7 words is only a 43% match.

But please do realize it is not only the title that influences the ranking.