ASCII codes in Title? Will Search Engines Crawl?

Marketing
1

Hi,

What are all the ASCII Codes accepted by Google and other search engines?
I would like to add some ASCII codes like |, @, copyright and trademark symbols to my title. Will SE’s crawl these symbols?

Thanks and Regards,
SAN

2

I don’t know much about international font encoding, but what I would suggest is … give it a try! Put some Unicode characters in your title and content, give it a few weeks, see how they’re doing in various search engines … and then come back and let us know the answer!

3

I have the same question, but different usage of ASCII, or rather in the case of Unicode. Sometimes I need to use Unicode in words that are outside of the English language so that they render consistently in different browsers.

For example:

In the Turkish language the word ‘Şahane’ (pronounced Sha-haney) translates to mean “wonderful” or “fantastic”.

http://www.seslisozluk.com/?word=%C5%9Fahane

Many browsers will corrupt the letter ‘Ş’ so here we must use the Unicode string ’ & # 350 ; ’ <— (without whitespaces)

So the question is, will search engines read this as Şahane or & # 350 ; ahane (or ‘ahane’ or not at all!) if placed in content or title tag?

Thanks for any insight!

4

I mean, do search engines consider these symbols upon indexing our web pages.
Will that symbols affect our keyword optimization on title.

5

what do you mean by crawl these symbols (or did you mean index)? What do you have actually in mind? how would these symbols help your SEO effort - or would the counter-effect your SEO? I mean nobody is searching for | on Google.

6

Using ASCII symbols in your titles was an trick that people used to use to get an advantage* in the SERPs.

Not sure if it still works or not though.

  • To head off the inevitable questions as to how this gives you an advantage. If you see an entire page of text (a SERP) and one of those lines has some wierd symbols in it, which are you subconsciously going to focus on? I’ll give you a hint, it’s the one with the wierd symbols in it. So, in theory, that should give you a boost in viewing and potentially a boost in CTR regardless of position.
7

Search engines will read whatever ASCII symbols you put in the title and will reproduce these in SERPs. I’m not sure why you would want to put a copyright or trademark symbol in your page title though … unless the page is specifically about that symbol, it’s taking up valuable space but not contributing anything.

Note that in general, search engines ignore punctuation unless it has a specific meaning in the context (eg C++ or mod_rewrite), or a special meaning within the search algorithm (eg quotes to search for a complete phrase, minus symbols to exclude a word).

8

sure, I mean the difference in keyword density between having such symbols and not having them are significant, just as they are between using punctuation and not using punctuation.