I know this sounds absolutely ridiculous, but I was told by my friend that by adding the TM (Trademark) â„¢ symbol to his website that it has increased his website url in the Google SERPS! He said that Google classifies companies with this symbol to be of greater importance than the others. What are your thoughts and opinions about this? To test this out for myself, I've added it to the footer of my friends site that is doing horrible in the Google SERPS! http://www.peterbrucephotography.com
Right now I can't find a single site using the â„¢ symbol. Even sites heavily optimized for Google. In my opinion that's just a myth. Your friend was probably building backlinks at the same time.
Yeah I strongly doubt the trademark symbol would have any effect on rankings. In some niches I could imagine it could improve click through rates slightly. This in turn might boost rankings. It wouldn't be the trademark symbol directly causing the improved rankings though. The search engines are very wary of putting much weight on any factors that can be very easily exploited.