Characters in Page Tile

I recently noticed when searching throug Google a couple of different sites that made their title stand out with these characters: ¤ Mydomain.com ¤

Does it make a difference one way or the other if you do this?

 

If you search for such a character: http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=¤ is seems to be the same results as when you click the search button with no phrase at all. So te me it seems like Google discards them from the search phrase. So from G's perspective, they won't help and I doubt they will hurt. From a consumer perspective, yes they do stand out so it might attract more people but personnaly, I tend to associate these things with 12 to 15 year old girls on MSN Messenger... In other words, not very professional! Just my opinion.

 

You can sometimes seem them show up, though its not very common.. or useful

 

looking for a host, I checked out Clara.net. I was a but surprised finding their title are all like this: c l a r a . n e t with the useless spaces. Don't they want to get found I thought?

What struck me was that this google search here c l a r a gices the exact same results as the search here clara .

Letter by letter phrases are treated differently than word by word phrases.

Strange to say the least. What would be the reasoning behind this?

 

Even stranger:

clara . net
United Kindom : France : Deutschland : España. © 2003 Claranet Limited: About Us.
www.clara.net/ - 5k - 28 Jul 2004 - Cached - Similar pages

In the SERPs G decides to show it without the spaces, apart from those next to the . :S

 

My "favorite" for this type of stuff is my longest car page - try punching that term into Yahoo or MSN and it's a pretty cool title tag if I do say so myself ... unfortunately, as Shawn points out, Google excluded certain characters a while back so doesn't look at cool there.

I actually think this probably HURTS you in the SERP's since your keyword isn't as "focused" ... but for that page, I think it's worth it and adds to the page itself.

 

I wanted to ask Shawn whether or not certain characters in the page title could reduce the effectiveness of keywords. Recently, I heard that commas and pipes are considered to be separators in between keyword phrases, so it was advisable to remove them, thereby increasing the possible permutations - any thoughts on this?

 

I think that's true but if it indeed is then there is no difference between a comma or a space, except for exact matches perhaps.

Check this page title in google: http://www.google.co.uk/search?num=30&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=kneel+chairs+site:zarr.co.uk&meta=

I didn't even know a little sun existed. It sure gets the attention...

 

Check out my halloween page ... which includes some psuedo-jack-o-lanterns! ;-)

 

I thought you guys in that region of the US had some troubles finding enough energy at times.. I think I just found why...