Using special characters in Title, Description

[saikatblogger]

What is your opinion about using '&' sign instead of 'and' in Title and Description Meta tag? Is it good or bad or nothing?

[full house]

Most of my competitor uses special character and they rank well! I think it not bad. But I don't don't use special characters in my site's title and descriptions.

[mjtaylor]

Use of special characters is neutral, except that it takes up valuable real estate, IMO.

[wige]

Also, as a non-SEO note, some browsers do not display special characters properly. Deepnet Explorer and a few other IE "wrappers" run into this issue.

[danners]

I treid putting 5 stars at the end of my title once to see if it appeared - it would give an impression that Google thought my listing was worthy of rating! Sadly the stars did not appear so I guess they were onto that one!
The ASCII code was ★ for the star

The ASCII code for the star is ampersandhash9733;

[tamecrow]

Originally Posted by danners

I treid putting 5 stars at the end of my title once to see if it appeared - it would give an impression that Google thought my listing was worthy of rating! Sadly the stars did not appear so I guess they were onto that one!
The ASCII code was ★ for the star

The ASCII code for the star is ampersandhash9733;

Now that's what I call thinking outside the box! Shame Google were even quicker off the mark!

[SemAdvance]

Originally Posted by danners

I treid putting 5 stars at the end of my title once to see if it appeared - it would give an impression that Google thought my listing was worthy of rating! Sadly the stars did not appear so I guess they were onto that one!
The ASCII code was ★ for the star

The ASCII code for the star is ampersandhash9733;

Try using non english characters to make the stars.

I used non- english characters in SEO and PPC ads effectively.

[tamecrow]

Originally Posted by SemAdvance

Try using non english characters to make the stars.

I used non- english characters in SEO and PPC ads effectively.

Do you have an example of the characters you used effectively?