Is it ok to use encoded special characters in meta titles?

[BostonWright]

I've read blog posts stating that encoding special characters in title tags is both ok and not ok. Any definitive answer out there?

Do the extra characters from adding encoding count towards the total number of characters that Google displays in SERPs? Or do they just count as one character?

[RyanKent]

Do the extra characters from adding encoding count towards the total number of characters that Google displays in SERPs? Or do they just count as one character?

Are you referring to foreign characters? Titles such as "Здравейте българи"?

They each count as one character.

I am basing that understanding on an example I located. When I search the above page in Google the 2nd result shows a title with 60+ visible characters. When I view page source on Google, I see the very long encoded characters which far exceed the 70 character title limit.

Example:<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com/Здравейте-българи/" />

I know Roger complains during SEOmoz crawls. I wish Roger could be as smart as the Google crawler

[BostonWright]

Sorry for not being more specific. I meant, is it ok to use { in place of { and [ in place of [. I am more concerned with using hard coded special characters having a negative impact on rankings than title length. I've read that Bing tells webmasters not to use <>{} but I've seen elsewhere that these are ok on Google. Would hard coding these make their use acceptable on all SEs?

[RyanKent]

I am pretty sure the answer is going to be no. I think the SEs will see the hard-coded characters as what you entered and wont convert them. There is probably a way to get the characters you entered recognized, but I am not sure what the process would be.

As a test, I made a new Q&A. The title is exactly 57 characters. SEOmoz appends " | SEOmoz Q&A" to the end of each title which is an additional 13 characters. We can check later when the page gets indexed and see what happened.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/se-test-jon-goldberg-123-91-389412345678951234567

[RyanKent]

I performed the following Google.com search "SE test insite:seomoz". The result is the page found at: http://www.seomoz.org/q/se-test-jon-goldberg-123-91-389412345678951234567

The search result appears with the complete title including the full appended " | SEOmoz Q&A" added to the end. All characters appear as entered with none converted.

Do these results answer your question?

[BostonWright]

Thanks that was very helpful!