Q and A: Should I use | to separate keywords in my Title Tag?

Dear Kalena...

This is a great website, there's definitely a cup of coffee coming your way. Wondered if I could ask your opinion on the following.

Title Meta Tags, I was recently looking at a website by a guy in the UK who works for an SEO company, I noticed he had separated his Keywords in his title tags by using the | character. Do you think this makes any difference whatsoever as far as search engines are concerned?

Thanks again Kalena
Graham

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Graham

The short answer is no. If you actually conduct a search for the "|" (vertical bar) in Google, you get zero matches, suggesting that Google ignores that symbol. However, according to this site, Google uses the vertical bar as an operator that means the same as "OR" when conducting advanced searches.

I don't believe this would prevent Googlebot from indexing a Title Tag containing "|", but it may confuse things. At best, the symbol would be ignored. To be on the safe side, I would avoid using any symbols in your Title Tags to ensure your entire keyword phrases get indexed in the order you prefer.

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