(11)
The use of HTML entities in Google's search results in order to make your snippets stand out is nothing new. We've been reporting on it for literally ten years. We've seen it in sitelinks and AdWords and we've even seen webmasters experiment with emoji characters.
Sean Murray noticed Google allowing HTML entities to be displayed and posted about it in Google+. You can see it yourself on many (not all) browsers and operating systems by searching for [✨].
Here is an example of a snippet with this working:
Typically, Google will disable this from working going forward but we will see.
I added it to the title tag of this page to test.
Forum discussion at Google+.
Comments:
Krzysztof Deszcz
04/04/2013 02:17 pm
Does not work in this case, any way this guy seomofo.com is quite good with messing Googles snippets
Tom Morang
04/04/2013 02:23 pm
I haven't seen too many uses of this, but when I do, I get a really bad vibe. I tend to ignore them.
Sean Murray
04/04/2013 03:40 pm
Looks like my secret is out!
Oleg Korneitchouk
04/04/2013 03:49 pm
Your search - ✨ - did not match any documents. What have you done!
Sean Murray
04/04/2013 04:21 pm
it works on twitter too, at least under my mac firefox browser.
bob rains
04/04/2013 04:24 pm
Yeah it stands out, but don't these little charm like flourishes smell like myspace to most savvy users?
Dario Petkovic
04/04/2013 10:16 pm
Pretty cool, I never seen HTML entitles before. Thanks.
Errioxa
04/04/2013 10:29 pm
I "painted" the titles and descriptions, but only black and white!! http://goo.gl/aN4Wx
Sharon
04/05/2013 07:55 am
Thats nice and pretty cool. I've never seen this before. Thanks www.i-ambition.com
David
04/08/2013 08:33 am
Looks cool, first time I am seeing this, but not really professional IMHO.Could work for social sites though...
Sean Murray
04/08/2013 04:54 pm
I conducted tests to find out how compatible these Emoji symbols are with different browsers and operating systems: Displayed more than 90% of tested Emoji Symbols: Mac Mountain Lion – Firefox 20 Mac Mountain Lion – Firefox 19 Mac Mountain Lion – Safari 6.03 Mac Lion – Firefox 20 Mac Lion – Firefox 19 Mac Lion – Safari 6.03 Mac Lion – Safari 5.0 Windows 8 – Firefox 18 Windows 8 – Internet Explorer 10 Windows 7 – Internet Explorer 10 iPhone 4s – Safari iPhone 4s (6.0) – Safari iPhone 5 – Safari iPad 3 – Safari iPad 3 (6.0) – Safari Droid Samsung Galaxy s3 – default browser Google Nexus 7 – default browser Full presentation of what I did and how I did it. http://www.slideshare.net/seanbash/emoji-symbols-in-google-search-results