Special characters in meta description

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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Special characters in meta description

backdraft7

12:02 pm on May 24, 2010 (gmt 0)

I would like to add a trademark or registered trademark symbol to my meta description to help carry some company "weight" and to show customers we are the real deal, in contrast to a stalker competitor who plagiarizes the daylights out of my site.
The question is, will the use of special characters in my meta description stop Google dead in it's tracks or get my meta tag ignored?

© is created with:©
® is created with:®
™ is created with:

Since Google is now more about the user experience (or so they say) I would expect that these characters would be OK.

I currently use them effectively in my Adwords ads.
I already own a federally registered trademark for my service.

tedster

6:40 pm on May 24, 2010 (gmt 0)

I've seen these characters showing up in the snippets and SERP titles - so they do seem to be OK with Google. That doesn't mean that every search engine will deal with HTML entities properly if they appear in the title or meta description. In fact, historically they haven't.

I believe that technically, there are not supposed to be any special characters in either place. Even the ampersand used to be problematic, but it's part of many company names (like AT&T) that technical accommodations have been made.

I had one case a few years ago where the HTML entity was being displayed "verbatim" so I just pasted in the actual character and that worked fine.

Lame_Wolf

6:45 pm on May 24, 2010 (gmt 0)

I did once see a heart in the title tag of the SERPS. Seeing it did make me click on it.

conor

10:04 pm on May 24, 2010 (gmt 0)

I have seen Arrows and Hearts show up in the SERPs seeming to rank well for moderatly conpetetive phrases.

Through the use and need of symbols by Adwords advetisers Google has learned to adapt to their presence in the organic index.