HTML entity characters in meta descriptions

[ellenu]

Is it okay to leave HTML entity characters, such as " in meta descriptions? Will search engines translate these appropriately?

[zeehj]

Hey there! Meta descriptions support non-encoded characters, and search engines will display these characters correctly in SERPs; you don't need to use " to represent " in meta descriptions. You'll see an example of this for the w3 result in this SERP, where you see the " as well as " in its meta description.

Since you're writing meta descriptions for users, and not search engine crawlers, I would recommend you find + replace these characters with their reader-friendly version. Search engines will present the characters you've inserted into your meta descriptions, which may negatively impact users' abilities to read your meta descriptions (and be less likely to click on your results in search).

hope this helps

[ellenu]

Thank you for the response, Zee.

I've been told that Google is "familiar" with character escaping and will interpret the description correctly. Is there a way to confirm this?

We're programmatically populating meta descriptions for one of our applications and having trouble converting the HTML entity characters.

Thank you
Ellen-