Difference in using dividers in TITLE TAG

[JesusD]

Hi everyone, i know that dividers in title or even title tag doesnt have much of an impact on better rankings. I had great rankings for many keywords, not using dividers or using only one divider. However for better reading comprehension and usability, and also aesthetics i started to use the pipe as my main divider and other secondary dividers. I saw many pages drop in rankings vs other less competent and with less content pages. My format was as follows:

Product Brand | Product description - Additional info or local info

ie.  Fiber Glass MBI | Insulation Batts for Home and Commercial use -  Acoustic and Thermal Insulation

I changed the format for a handful of pages, and saw immediate results on rankings and traffic on those pages.

Product Brand with Product Description - Additional Info

ie. Fiber Glass MBI Insulation Batts for Commercial use - Acoustic and Thermal Insulation.

Does it sound like something i should implement page wide. I personally like the aesthetics of the pipe as it gives a cleaner look, but the better rankings on the changed pages with using only one divider makes me think.  Does it sound familiar, or its just a coincidence,

Regards,

[Chris.Menke]

Jesus,

Did you change anything else besides just inserting the pipes?

[NakulGoyal]

Was this a Wordpress blog and did you install a plugin to do these changes ?

[Travis_Bailey]

The problem with figuring out the benefit of these minute changes is that there are thousands of other changes that have occurred. Many of them are out of our control. So while you were experimenting with separators, another webmaster might have made a change that made a competing page or pages decrease. And that's just one example.

It would make for an interesting outlying case if your site/pages were positioned just so that one weird, seemingly innocuous, tweak made the difference.

If you've seen the first film in the Star Trek reboot, you might remember how Scotty figured out his transporter problem. Well, actually Future Spock just gave it to him - since Future Scotty was going to fix the problem anyway. But upon looking at the calculations, Scotty realized that space itself was also moving. Which was why his previous experiments were a disaster.

What I'm saying is, aside from 'I'm a dork', is nothing exists in a vacuum. It's very hard to determine if a tiny change had a positive benefit. There are so many external factors/moving parts. Though it would help reduce uncertainty if you didn't change anything else.

[JesusD]

I also changed the meta description tag in these pages. I did some general content maintenance, such as review the outgoing links, add some images, but nothing else.

My incoming links have been increasing since July, but ive seen better results with the pages with Title Tags with no dividers or only one divider. I need to dig deeper, as i researched that the title tag alone doesnt make much of a difference.

[JesusD]

Negative, its a network solutions hosted page. With regular code.

[JesusD]

As i am responsible for the page changes, i didnt do much really. Just some minor tweaks in the description page, some new content, my incoming links have been increasing slightly. But i see better results with the pages with titles with no dividers.

Maybe its a coincidence, i just thought maybe something was going on with the dividers. But it doesnt seem that way. Is there anything else i might be missing as why these pages rank better than other similar pages?

Great star trek example haha, thanks!

[Travis_Bailey]

I would say more links and new/refreshed content would definitely have more to do with it than the presence or absence of a pipe.

With a pipe the title will be slightly longer. The example titles you gave seem on the long side, but nothing longer than most in that industry.

[JesusD]

Thanks for the response and follow up. I will dig deeper as to why the better rankings and incoming traffic recently.

Regards,