Is 1¦1¦1¦ in front of title considered spamming?

[larry12468]

I notice in the source code of a page, that 1¦1¦1¦
is inserted in front of the first words of the <title>
as in the following example. I assume that is supposed
to help in search engine ranking, but isn't it likely
to be considered spaming by search engines

<title>1¦1¦1¦Widget Company, Our County Widgets</title>

[edited by: tedster at 9:13 am (utc) on Mar. 8, 2003]
[edit reason] sorry, no specifics [/edit]

[tedster]

It really wouldn't boost a site on crawler/algorithm based search engines. In fact, the additional characters in the title tag just *might* dilute the effect of any keywords in there.

But directories that list in alphabetical order are another story. By the way, I've seen directories decide that non-alphabet characters should go on the end of their list.