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When you have a title tag with an & (ampersand), how should you best structure it?
My thought would be to use "and," but some people say that the & works. The W3C validator will not approve of the & sign itself.
Additionally, you should consider that if you're doing a search, you're likely not going to be pressing the & key. If you're doing exact match, you'll likely type in "and." For the ease of search, "and" is recommended.
What do you think? Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum.
Comments:
Ian N
11/29/2007 03:13 pm
Personally, I'd go with your suggestion to use "and,". It just seems more logical to type the word out because, as you say, nobody types & into the search box.
jt
11/29/2007 04:28 pm
Also the "&" may appear as a paramater and not therefore readable to the SE - we know the word "and" is. IMHO it also looks better to use the actual word.
Chad
05/10/2009 04:29 am
Google crawlers by pass insignificant words like and, in, or, etc. so having ad doesnt' matter, however I would still shy away from using the ampersand
RS
04/06/2010 02:46 pm
Actually, I got some very different results from googles keyword checker tool when differentiating between "B&B supplies" and "b and b supplies" 880 searches for the former and below 10 for the latter. what a wierd anomally
mark
07/19/2010 12:10 pm
If you're optimising for brand terms like D&G then & a m p ; works in place (better than the other escaped version)
Matthew Kyle
09/09/2011 10:16 pm
Here is an interesting test. If you do a search for "Johnson and Johnson" google will highlight all terms that say "Johnson & Johnson". Also, the search for both "johnson & johnson" and (or & hahaha) "johnson and johnson" both returned the same results. This, to me confirms my suspicion, Google uses the two as one in the same. I would recommend using the "&" in title and descriptions if you need to save space. Otherwise I am sure you need to still use it as grammatically correct as possible. -Bloodello