Should You Use "Ignored" Characters In Your Titles?

[Planet13]

Hi there, Everyone:

There are apparently certain characters that google ignores in searches. Can they be used in your titles to make them more eye catching in the SERPS?

Apparently, characters such as the ^ character and the @ character are ignored in google. So if you were to do a search for "^ widgets ^" you would get the same results as if you searched just for "widgets"

But do you think there are any negative SEO ramifications to doing this?

And does anybody have a complete list of CURRENT characters that are ignored?

[lucy24]

Generally, punctuation is ignored, including @#$%^&*()=+[]\ and other special characters.

Notice how they put the plus sign in their "generally ignored" list-- immediately before explaining situations where it is not ignored [google.com]. Leading hyphens are ignored, because they have a reserved meaning, but mid-word hyphens aren't.

Is punctuation language-specific? Obvious example is "" versus »«.

Even if it's ignored, a character isn't actually wiped from g###'s memory. I particularly remember one that showed up in my logs slathered with curly quotes and em-dashes.

If your page is written in Roman script, or certain others such as polytonic Greek, all diacritics will be ignored in the search-- even if what they consider a diacritic is an entirely separate letter. They could hardly penalize you for using the correct form in your title.* Or for putting an apostrophe where it belongs.


* Are they intelligent enough to penalize you for using a raw non-ASCII character in a title if you put it before the "charset" declaration? Probably not.

[Planet13]

Thanks Lucy24

OK, so does anyone have any real world experience where they put in special characters and how it affected (or didn't affect) their rankings?

(And although this ISN'T the forum for discussing clickthrough rates - as far as I know - if you have experience on how it affected your clickthrough rates, feel free to share it).