Should I use pipes or dashes in my titles?



Blind Five Year Old from San Francisco, CA asks:

“Does Google have any suggestions (or data) on the impact of pipes versus dashes in the title tag?”

This video is part of a “Grab Bag” series in which Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, answers questions from webmasters. We’re not currently taking new video questions, so your best bet for getting an answer about webmaster-related search issues is to head to our help forum:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en

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15 thoughts on “Should I use pipes or dashes in my titles?”

  1. I think there is another answer to this question….

    dashes win with usability in the sense that every one is going to know ho to use a dash and will be able to easily type it in a browser and they will ofcourse see it.

    pipes will have better click through bc they are less intrusive or alienaiting. Dashes are tacky looking, so are pipes but pipes go over looked.

    use pipes….

    actually use dashes.

    ha.

  2. What are "pipes"?

    And these (e.g. these: "»") are chevrons, right?

    I know what a hyphen is ("-"), and I know what an en dash ("") is and what an em dash ("—") is, but I've never heard of pipes before.

  3. The biggest issue with parameter separators in the title is that some characters are not supported in various operating systems for the file system, so when a user bookmarks the page (which in some situations will then sync to a webservice), the bookmark will be renamed. This effectively replaces many characters with either a dash or completely remove the character. In most cases, pipes and chevrons are completely removed, while dashes, commas and other characters are preserved as intended.

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