Does | Google | Like | Vertical | Bars | In | Your | Title?

So say you have a dog website...

Would this title be better?

Dogs, Dog Training Tips, Feeding Dogs - www.dogs.com

or this one?

Dogs | Dog Training Tips | Feeding Dogs | www.dogs.com


Personally, I don't see a difference SEO wise. Are the "|" better than commas for search engines? Or maybe the "|" just stand out more?

 

This is a good question and I am interested in hearing the concensus on this. I really don't know myself, but I normally use the vertical bar or dashes, but only because it looks cleaner not for any SEO purpose.

 

It is only the question of attractiveness of your site's title.
"|" don't have SEO effect ;-)

 

Well I have been using "pipes" since 2002 on www.luxurysleep.com for some time. I have noticed it has been catching on. I do much SEO and I have used them exclusively for some time. Personally I just like how they look in the SERPS.

-Dal

 

I would say two things:

1) The vertical bars are more difficult to read and may not be generated properly in all browsers so you might lose potential clicks (users)

2) The "comma" has a grammatical meaning in English. I cannot say with certainty that SEs take this into consideration but I would suggest being safer by having the title mean something grammatically rather than look like an attempt to fill it with keywords.

Hope that helps.

 

Of course, as Dal has pointed out, sometimes being different (rather than 'safe') generates more clicks too

 

I disagree strongly about this. The vertical bar is a part of international 255 ascii character. It's been a standard since the 1st giant IBM machine. If a browser does not support the vertical bar FULLY... throw that browser away. It's older than stone age.

Agree with this. "|" doesn't have any seo effect. I personally just "read better" sites with vertical bars.

 

Quite interestingly, the "|" is mapped to different characters in many European characters sets as well as in Japanese ones. I guess, there are a couple others, too. In German, for example, it officially maps to "ö".

HOWEVER, this is more or less irrelevant in practice. I do not know any browser (or other app) that uses the national character sets any longer (at least by default). So display-wise, it should be save.

I just thought I contribute that funny history fact

Rainer

 

I use vertical bars on my websites because I like the look of it.

 

I don't see any difference in ranking terms using | to separate keywords in the title. Here is one popular site that uses them throughout http://news.bbc.co.uk/ so I would say it doesn't do any harm to use them as they certainly wouldn't... but I cant say if its of any benefit in the serps....it doesn't benefit my sites anyway.

 

Richkid hit it right on, it is mostly the look I like over any other possible benefits.


-Dal

 

For SEO it shouldn't matter a bit - Google probably ignores it.

But, for users it's a great way to separate keywords in your title in a way that is useful to the user. I like to see those when I'm searching myself.

 

Yeah, breaking up the title into nice little chucks of information is nice and it stands out from the crowd.

 

Well for me its nothing but differentiating neatly between what you have to say about your websites, there may be two things that you want to say about your site, and this "|" can cleanly differentiate between the two, comma can make it look like a confused webmaster, but dashes give that elegant look, SEO angle there is nothing to it, its all crap

 

Often times separators mean different things to a search engine inside a query. A hyphen works as a localized EXACT operation, while a vertical bar works as an OR operation.

 

I think | is more SEO friendly.... Because I have used a plugin "all in one seo" for wordpress for my site www.minterest.com now that plugins default option is to replace the ">>" in the tile bar to | so i think | is more seo friendly but its just my guess...

 

Is still a special character, and if you can loose it or replace it, its better
try to read a title like this in a UNIX browser and u will understand

 

in my opinion , the first one is better for seo

 

The term for what you are asking about is called a "delimiter" - i had wondered about this 4 or 5 years ago (yeah I been SEO'ing a long time, longer than that actually) , but as I said it was so long ago I cant remember the exact conclusions, I read several whitepaper comparisons on it. (yeah i am a nerd Anyway, searching on "delimiter" should return the relevant results you want. From what I can recall the vertical bar, sometimes called "pipe" IS used as a delimiter in some engines, some not, and obviously the hyphen is another.

 

it is said so that "|" is better as per SEO point of view rather than using "-" in the title. Rest who knows about Google's alogos.