Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
• symbol in title tag
-
We have a few title tags with a circular dot symbol, which is created by the code "•"
Humans see a dot, but googlebot sees •
Does this negatively impact our SEO, or is googlebot aware that **• == *** to human eyes
-
Hey Graeme
I am unsure of any specific guidelines with regards to HTML special characters but I would tend to keep my page titles to the agreed and safe characters. In this instance, the page title is totally fine but ascii has been abused in page titles in years gone by to create more catchy looking SERP listings.
(¯
'·.¸(¯'·.¸Free X !!! Click Here !!!¸.·'´¯)¸.·'´¯)You may find a variety of things happen and your titles get rewritten.
One other point or perspective - you mention that Googlebot sees the ascii code but a human sees the bullet character. Well, where? How does your SERP listing look? If the page title in the search engine results looks like this:
My Product • Category | Site Name
Then, I would say that is a pretty good reason to do away with the special characters.
If this was me, I would keep it simple, stick with the best practices and make do with standard characters to break up your title tags: - | etc.
Some links that may help:
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/title-tag
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35624
Hope that helps!
Marcus
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicated titles and meta descriptions
Hi, Dealing with both my duplicated titles and meta descriptions i'm wondering if there's a "quick" win I could potentially implement asap. A bit of background:
Technical SEO | | GhillC
Say I've 4 pages structured that way: domain.com/us/productA.html for the US domain.com/gb/productA.html the UK domain.com/fr/productA.html for France domain.com/de/productA.html For Germany At the moment, both my page titles and meta-descriptions are duplicated all over the place for product A.
Title is reading "Product A - company name"
MD is a bit better, being translated in all 3 languages (En, Fr, DE). Therefore being the same for the US and for the UK. Ideally, I would get unique page titles and MD all over the place. However, due to time and resource constraints, I can't make it happen overnight. So my questions are pretty simple:
1. Can I create a rule for page titles to be "Product A - country - company name" or similar? Would that be enough to make the page titles unique? Is there any value doing so?
2. Can I "localize" duplicate MD by simply naming the country? I assume it is not enough in this case as all the rest would be copy/pasted. Ideally speaking, both my page titles and MD would be completely unique but I can't afford doing so in the short term. Thanks!0 -
Can a H1 Tag Have Multiple Spans Within It?
H1 tags on my client's website follow the template [Service] + [Location]. These two have their own span, meaning there are two spans in an H1 tag. class="what">Truck Repair near class="where">California, CA How do crawl bots see this? Is that okay for SEO?
Technical SEO | | kevinpark1910 -
Seeing URL Slugs as search result titles
I've been seeing some search results for my site that look like the first result here, where the URL slug is used as SERP title: https://drive.google.com/a/fitsmallbusiness.com/file/d/0B37y4RslpuY-a0hQYjlJQ0NxeFJicDF6RVlURFVSNFN0aGhB/view?usp=sharing The article title (and Yoast snippet title) are both "28 Press Release Examples From The Pros", but for some reason I'm seeing "press-release-examples" in the search results. I've seen this for multiple articles, and I see it now and then with different articles. I'm aware that Google often changes the titles in search results, but it seems very weird to me that they would opt for just the URL slug here. Thoughts? Has anyone else seen this issue? Any idea what might be causing this? All help much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | davidwaring0 -
Same H1 & H2 Tags
Is it bad to have the same H1 & H2 tag on one page? I found a similar question here on the moz forum but it didn't exactly answer my question. And will adding "about" on the H2 help, or should we avoid duplicate tags completely? Here is a link to the page in question (which will repeat throughout this site.) Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Mike.Bean0 -
Do H2 tags carry more weight than h4 tags?
Of course H tags are key signals for relevance in search. Does an h2 tag send a significantly "louder" signal than an h4 tag?
Technical SEO | | aj6130 -
Should I include tags in sitemap?
Hello All, I was wondering if you should include tags and categories in your sitemap. In the past on previous blogs I have always left tags and categories out. The reason for this is a good friend of mine who has been doing SEO for a long time and inhouse always told me that this would result in duplicate content. I thought that it would be a great idea to get some input from the SEOmoz community as this obviously has a big affect on your blog and the number of pages indexed. Any help would be great. Thanks, Luke Hutchinson.
Technical SEO | | LukeHutchinson1 -
Google Off/On Tags
I came across this article about telling google not to crawl a portion of a webpage, but I never hear anyone in the SEO community talk about them. http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/08/23/tell-google-to-not-index-certain-parts-of-your-page/ Does anyone use these and find them to be effective? If not, how do you suggest noindexing/canonicalizing a portion of a page to avoid duplicate content that shows up on multiple pages?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan1 -
Why are apostrophes and other characters still showing as code in my titles?
Hi, I have a WordPress-based site and overall everything is working well. However, I can't seem to figure out how to get apostrophes and other characters to display normally. Now, the problem isn't that they are displaying as code to normal visitors or up in the title bar, they are displaying as code to Google's bots as well as to SEOMOZ. Example: Normal visitor sees: About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts Google and SEOMOZ see: About **** | **** - Metro Vancouver's IT & Web Experts I've played around with different ways of typing the title (not using character codes vs. using character codes) and nothing seems to work. Any help or explanation would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Function50