Bars Verus Hyphens in Title Tags
-
It has been quite a while since I have seen an article really talk about this and I am wondering if this even matters anymore? I prefer the look of a - rather than a | but just wondering if this is still a thing... If you know of a recent article going into findings on this supporting one or the other it would be appreciated.
Thanks!
-
Use a colon. Requires one less space.
-
Hi Thomas
It really does not matter anymore. If anything, there might be more reason to use a hyphen rather than a |.
Starting about a year ago, Google seemed to be rewriting the title tags of pages that looked like: "Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Brand.com" into "Brand.com: Keyword 1 | Keyword 2" - Here's an article on that. I've seen it happen with hyphens too but far less often.
But in any case, use whichever option you prefer. I like the hyphen too, but there's nothing right or wrong with either - just be sure to make your title tag designed for the user and for clicks rather than search engines (out with the example I used earlier, in with "Get Keyword 1 with free USA delivery - Brand" style title tags - and make sure it will show up in search and not be shortened. You can use Moz's title tag tool for that.
Hope this helps.
-
The main thin I consider is that the maximum size of the title is defined by the pixel-width, not by the character count. For this reason, I prefer "|" as you can fit more on it. But for individual services on a brand with a short name, "-" can be preferable.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate title while setting canonical tag.
Hi Moz Fan, My websites - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/ has run financial service, So our main keywords is about "Insurance" in Thai, But today I have an issues regarding to carnonical tag. We have a link that containing by https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance?showForm=1&brand_id=9&model_id=18&car_submodel_id=30&ci_source_id=rabbit.co.th&car_year=2014 and setting canonical to this url - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance within 5,000 items. But in this case I have an warning by site audit tools as Duplicate Page Title (Canonical), So is that possible to drop our ranking. What should we do, setting No-Index, No-Follow for all URL that begin with ? or keep them like that.
Technical SEO | | ASKHANUMANTHAILAND0 -
Bing webmaster tools incorrectly showing missing title and description tags
Hey all, Was wondering if anyone else has come across this issue. Bing is showing title and description tags missing in the head of my wordpress blog. I can't seem to find any documentation on this. Thanks, Roman
Technical SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
Meta tag Syntax
Hi, This might seem silly. What is the correct syntax for the meta tag used when noindexing webpages? I have "". I have seen it both with and without the forward slash before the greater than sign. Does it make any difference if the forward slash is present or not? Cheers
Technical SEO | | McCaldin0 -
Tag archives in wordpress
I have duplicate content issue on my site, because i allow to index tags in my wordpress. And the content overlaps on them. What could be a solution to this? How do i fight it, if still want my tag pages to be indexed in Google, but i don't want to to influence my traffic negatively? Currently i have 596 tags! 🙂 Site:
Technical SEO | | pycckuu
richclubgirl.com My idea was to put canonical tag for the post i want to rank from the most popular tag pages (with biggest page authority). Would love to hear from You!1 -
Title Tags & Url Structure
So I'm working on a website for a client in the Tourism Industry. We've got a comprehensive list of museums & other attractions in a number of cities that have to go online. And we have to come up with the correct url structure, title tags and obviously content. My current line of thought was to work the urls in the following way. http://domain.com/type-of-attraction/city/name-of-attraction/ This is mainly because we think that the type of attraction is far more important then the city (SEO wise) as the country as a whole receives more searches, however we require a city in the url to make it unique because some attractions across cities happen to share names and we don't want to have the names of attractions littered with city names. However for title-tags I wanted to go the other way around, again due to the attraction type being more important then the city. Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction - City - Brand Name or Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction in City - Brand Name I am quite confident in working it this way; however I would appreciate if I receive some feedback on this structure, you think its good or you would make any suggestions / alterations. One last thing, There's the possibility of having many urls ending up with the same city names (For each type of attraction) I would think that just providing a list of links & duplicate text is not enough; would you suggest a canonical pointing to a link containing just information on the city? and using the other pages for user-navigation only? or should i set variables in the text which are replaced by the types of attraction so that the text looks different for each one?
Technical SEO | | jonmifsud0 -
Duplicate titles / canonical / Drupal
I have a site where there are several duplicate titles, looks like mainly based on a parameterized vs. non-parameterized version of the page. I have what appears to be a proper canonical tag, but webmaster still complains of both duplicate titles & meta descriptions. A good example (taken out of webmaster report for http://igottadrive.com) is: /driving-tips/mirror-setup-and-use /driving-tips/mirror-setup-and-use?inline=true If I look at the page (in either case) there appears to be a correct canonical tag pointing to the base case. However, for some reason google is either ignoring the canonical or its not properly done. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | uwaim20120 -
Title elements too long - good for SEO?
As I was reviewing a client's web pages I noticed that most of the pages have titles that exceed the 70 characters limit. By looking in more details it seems that Google uses all keywords from this long titles. I wanted to reduce the titles under 70 characters but realised that I may cut some important keywords. By reducing to 70 characters, do you think I can damage the performance?.
Technical SEO | | DavidSpivac0 -
Canonical tags
Hi there, I have just noticed that SEOmoz picked up some duplicates links that I would like to resolve but not sure how. For example, the "Finding work in the arts" article has two links: http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/finding-work-in-the-arts http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/develop-your-career/article/finding-work-in-the-arts?utm_source=Website&utm_medium=Website&utm_content=Finding+work+in+the+arts&utm_campaign=Footer+Links Both links can be found on this page http://www.creative-choices.co.uk/industry-news-views/article/what-employers-are-looking-for (see attachment). Would automatically generated canonical tags by the CMS solve this issue? rmxiP
Technical SEO | | CreativeChoices0