Over the past few months I’ve noticed more title tags and meta descriptions using different types of characters to stand out in the search results. PPC has led the way with uses of planes, bullet points, trade mark symbols. Problem is many adverts get disapproved by Google.
Organically it’s about testing what can and can’t indexed. So below I’ve made a list of characters that will get indexed in a title tag and display in the search engine results. Before the list a few interesting points from this experiment.
- Using the intitle: command doesn’t work, for example try “intitle:£” in Google and it returns nothing. Yet there are plenty of title tags with the £ symbol.
- A symbol can be hard-coded into a title tag but when you use a CMS it may try to convert it. Thus meaning to get some of the symbols into titles you’ll need to bypass your CMS or change the way it works.
- If you have a symbol in the title tag that Google won’t index they’ll skip the character when displaying the title tag in the search result.
To conduct the test I:
- 11 pages linked to sitewide on another site of mine
- Each page linked to each other
- Title tag contacted the special characters, as did the meta description.
- Waited for all the pages to be indexed and then viewed using a site command with inurl:test as the file names were test1, test2, etc
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