Use of ► in title

Triangular bullet character in title tag

[ecommerce man]

I've recently come across a few sites using ►in their title tags. The ► character is like a triangular bullet and makes pages stand out in Google results. I can only think that people are doing this to improve their click through rates.

Any comments?

[Small Website Guy]

Google will probably figure it out shortly and put a stop to it. In the meantime, those site owners are raking in more clicks.

[digitalpoint]

I'm not so sure they will ban it... it's a normal unicode character, so unless they want to selectively filter out certain characters, I'm not sure...

There are all sorts of other characters you can use too (hearts, stars, skull and crossbone, etc.)

The unicode character set has 256 characters allocated for "Miscellaneous Characters". I guess Google could simply filter that character range or something...

But why? If someone has a title that is in all caps or starts with "*******" or something, is it really Google's job to tell people what characters they can or can't use in their content?

- Shawn

[Small Website Guy]

Is the person using this character to make the user experience better? Or to get more clicks from Google?

Answer: he's doing it for the latter purpose. The character doesn't even show up on Internet Explorer.

Google doesn't like it when people change their web pages for the sole purpose of doing better in Google. Of course, a lot of things people do, Google can't do anything about. But with regards to the leading triangle, it would be easy enough for Google to filter that out.

[nakulgoyal]

They just try to highlight their listing and indeed it catches the eye.....

[pmac]

>Google will probably figure it out shortly and put a stop to it.<

Looks like they just did.

[Rossie]

Not noticing any difference here. And interestingly I've found the triangle symbol appears as a triangle even if you don't have the update pack installed, where the star etc. appear as squares.

[skipfactor]

>>The character doesn't even show up on Internet Explorer.

Shows up on IE6, hearts, triangles, oh so cute. Anbody know the unicode for a dancing bear?

>>Google doesn't like it when people change their web pages for the sole purpose of doing better in Google.

Since when?

[digitalpoint]

A list of all the unicode 2600-26FF (miscellaneous symbols) characters are available here:

[unicode.org...]

- Shawn

[pmac]

And now they are back. :)

[digitalpoint]

Sometimes it looks like they disappear, but they don't... Depends on how you search Google exactly... the method you are using to search would need to specify the output encoding as UTF-8 with a "&oe=UTF-8" in the URL...

- Shawn

[skipfactor]

Thanks Shawn! No dancing bear but there's a Yin Yang.

Can't believe folks are just starting to do this. I first noticed it a few weeks ago.