How does Google treat special characters in titles?

[Ria_]

Seems like a stupid question, but one that I never really gave much thought about before. How exactly does Google treat special characters in titles? Do they all get seen as spaces?

e.g. Does

Awesome Product - OptionA/OptionB/OptionC available

get seen the same way as

**Awesome Product - OptionA, OptionB, **OptionC available

? Or even

**Awesome Product - OptionA OptionB **OptionC available

? Or will Google see the first title as **OptionA/OptionB/OptionC **being a whole "keyword" due to there being no space between them? Like I've always just assumed that with apostrophised words will be seen as keyword s. And when using commas, there's always a space after the comma anyway. Are all "special characters" treated the same?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I like the commas - the way you have the /'s in your title make it look like one word. You could do...

Awesome Product - OptionA / OptionB / OptionC available

...but is that really the best title? I'd challenge you to come up with some different titles. If the variants are different enough to warrant their own pages with their own URLs, own descriptions, and markup, then you could create unique page titles that are dedicated to one product.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[Ria_]

I usually use commas as option separators, etc. But when pixel width is limited, sometimes the extra 3 or 4 characters comes in handy for things like Blue/Red/Black/White instead of Blue, Red, Black, White.

The specific example I had in mind in the OP (Awesome Product - OptionA/OptionB/OptionC available), I was actually thinking of a category page I'm working on and not a product (I realise now my choice of example title was confusing).

Originally, category structure was this:

Awesome Product

• OptionA

• Lots of products

• OptionB

• Lots of products

• OptionC

• Lots of products

• etc

But subcategories have been noticeably slipping over the past year, and I've attributed this down to the landing pages cannibalising each other. So I'm in the process of flattening the whole category and using filters to separate the different product options, and working on strengthening the main category page to accommodate all user search patterns. While drafting a new title for the category page to incorporate the deleted subcategories, I was just curious how Google treats the forward slashes as I'm usually a comma person too. And whether it makes a difference at all to Google.

**TL;DR: **I'll probably stick with the commas because it does look more readable for users, just wondering how Google reads characters like that and whether it extracts the separate keywords OptionA/OptionB/OptionC.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Ria

99.9% certain Google 'sees' all of those as the same in terms of character/word separation. I don't think OptionA/OptionB etc will be seen all as one keyword.

However Patrick has the right idea - to question if you really need one page or if things can be broken into separate pages.

I'd also optimize for readability and clicks too

-Dan

[Ria_]

Thanks for your input, Dan. I won't be using slashes but I was curious as to how they would work with Google.

The category page I had in mind at the time, I had just merged the multiple subcategory pages into the one main category due to cannibalisation evident in rankings (and I was experimenting with how to optimise browser title for previous subcategory-related keywords). The single page is already outperforming the separate pages, but thanks for your suggestion