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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Can I safely delete unused tags??
Can I safely delete unused tags, ones with 0 posts connected to them? Thanks, Mike
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Duplicate titles from hreflang variations
Hi, I am working on a large global site which has around 9 different language variations. We have setup the hreflang tags and referenced the corresponding content as follows: (We have not implemented a version X-default reference, as we felt it was not necessary) Using DeepCrawl and Search Console, we can see that these language variations are causing duplicate title issues. Many of them. My assumption was that the hreflang would have alleviated this issue and informed Google what is going on, however i wanted to see if anyone has any experience with this kind of thing before. It would be good to understand what the best practice approach is to deal with the problem. Is it even an issue at all, or just the tools being over-sensitive? Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Can I set a canonical tag to an anchor link?
I have a client who is moving to a one page website design. So, content from the inner pages is being condensed in to sections on the 'home' page. There will be a navigation that anchor links to each relevant section. I am wondering if I should leave the old pages and use rel=canonical to point them to their relevant sections on the new 'home' page rather than 301 them. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | Vizergy0 -
Hreflang Tag great for Google, what about Bing or others?
I've read that the Hreflang Tag is all the rave for International solutions on a per page basis. I haven't read much about what International agencies are using for non-Google search engines such as Bing. Is the common language meta tags the only solution? would love to see an article that addresses this
Technical SEO | | MikeSEOTruven0 -
Question on noscript tags and indexing
If I have a <noscript>tag on every page of my website with the same sentence over and over saying something to the effect of "Sorry our site uses Javascript, please enable javascript for the full site experience.", Webmaster Tools will tell me that one of the most common words on my site is "Javascript".</p> <p>Is this something to be concerned about from an SEO perspective? My site is obviously not about Javascript and I don't want to dilute my page's topic or authority by repeating words that are not relevant to the topic of my site.</p> <p>Thanks!</p></noscript>
Technical SEO | | IrvCo_Interactive0 -
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 -
Duplicate Title Tag issue due to Shopify CMS
Hi guys, I'm a novice really when it comes to SEO, yet have taken it in house for the next year or so, firstly because I have had my fingers burnt twice...and secondly, to allow me to recoup some of the loss from my prior campaigns. One thing I have noticed on my site (which uses a Shopify E-commerce CMS), is that Shopify duplicates a url for each my products. An example of this is http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/collections/designer-radiators-heating/products/reina-aliano
Technical SEO | | philscott2006
http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/products/reina-aliano Both products provide exactly the same information, yet appear in different ways subject to how the customer finds them. I contacted Shopify to find a fix to this issue when I noticed a high amount of Duplicate Title Tags in my SEO crawl. Their response was as follows. Using a rel canonical link will help prevent duplicate content issues with search engines. All you need to do is add this line of code: **<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />** ** before the tag in the theme.liquid file. It’s that simple :)** The theme liquid file basically generates the outer template for the whole site, and is only compromised when over-ruled. This all seems a little too easy for me, so I am hoping whether someone can elaborate as to whether this will work or not, as I'm not entirely sold on their response. I was always under the impression with canonical tags, that they should be added to the header section of the duplicate page in question, which refers back to the original page. The code I have been told to add above implies that the canonical tag would be added to every page in my site so the Google robot would have a hard time in finding anything at all of relevance Thanks in advance for any assistance with this. Kind Regards Phil Scott Vida Homes0 -
Do I need to add canonical link tags to pages that I promote & track w/ UTM tags?
New to SEOmoz, loving it so far. I promote content on my site a lot and am diligent about using UTM tags to track conversions & attribute data properly. I was reading earlier about the use of link rel=canonical in the case of duplicate page content and can't find a conclusive answer whether or not I need to add the canonical tag to these pages. Do I need the canonical tag in this case? If so, can the canonical tag live in the HEAD section of the original / base page itself as well as any other URLs that call that content (that have UTM tags, etc)? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | askotzko1