Special characters in Title tag

Does Google mind?

[Umbra]

Does anyone know -- from theory or experience -- whether special characters in the Title tag can hurt your rankings?

[takagi]

What kind of special characters are you thinking of? Letters with an acute or grave accent found in some European languages, or any non-alphanumerical characters found on a normal US keyboard?

[garylo]

My guess is that special characters in the Title tag will not hurt your rankings. What is importants is that you don't forgat to include your keywords in the Title tag.

[Umbra]

Hi Takagi,

I meant non-alphanumerical characters found on a normal US keyboard (such as ; :! &?)

[garylo]

These characters will definitely not hurt you.

[takagi]

I wouldn't start the title with these characters if the keywords are very competitive.

[EquityMind]

Actually...never use the? symbol...its a stop sign to the the search engine bot and could be construed as dynamic.

[takagi]

> never use the? symbol..

In an URL the question mark indicates a dynamic page. But in a title tag, there is no reason to avoid a question mark. If you search on Google

allintitle:+why [google.com]

you will find several page with a question mark in the title. Both at the end of the title and somewhere in between.