Pipe separators in title tag - how keyword results are bolded

[htdawg]

Hi
I just noticed while searching for something that websites which had a "¦" separator between their keywords in the title, that google only bolded the keyword phrase which was together. for example i was searching for "big luxury widgets"

and one of the results had a title like this

Big Widgets Shop ¦ Big Luxury Widgets ¦ Widget Sales

but only the keywords "Big Luxury Widgets" that were in the right order were bold

does it have something to do with the separator or is it better to uses commas and dashes instead?

[aakk9999]

Have you searched for the keyphrase in quotes?

What I noticed is that that there is a difference how words are bolded, depending on whether you use dash or pipe as separators, but this only seem to apply if the keyphrase searched for is in quotes.

For example:

1) Search for "widgets shop big" phrase in quotes

Big Widgets Shop ¦ Big Luxury Widgets ¦ Widget Sales (there will be nothing bolded here)
Big Widgets Shop - Big Luxury Widgets - Widget Sales (here the phrase seem to span over dash and will be bolded)

2) But if you search for the same three words, but not in quotes, then any word that match will be bolded, including the singular version of the word e.g. for the same search phrase but not in quotes the bolding is the same whether you use pipe or dash as a separators:

Big Widgets Shop ¦ Big Luxury Widgets ¦ Widget Sales
Big Widgets Shop - Big Luxury Widgets - Widget Sales

[htdawg]

it wasn't searched with quotes, it just made me think that google might not be counting the instances of the words in the title that were not in the right order, which would have to make us rethink the way we place our important keywords in our titles & descriptions if we use the pipe separator, dashes on the other hand do not make a difference. for example some searches you see two or three instances of the main keyword in the title and in order to be able to compete with that you would have to do it as well. i hope you get what I am talking about :)

thanks

[tedster]

The bold words that you see on the results page are created by a routine that is run AFTER the pages is assembled. It is not any indication of how the words are actually counted by the ranking algorithm.

Those bold words are only added to help the end user see where their keywords appear in each recult - in other words to encourage a click.