Over the years, SEOs and webmasters have tried to drive more attention to their listings in the search results by placing special characters in their title tags, URLs or meta descriptions. Literally, this dates back to 2003 and since then we've covered many times with including recently and also with Google's new emoji policy where they would show emojis in the search results if the query is emoji relevant.
Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that Google often will "just ignore & drop them."
@daveleusink Sure, but often we just ignore & drop them.
— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) May 2, 2017
A year ago, Google showed a unicode globe icon for Whatsapp in the search results. Those are still there.
So it isn't always true that Google removes or ignores all special characters...
Forum discussion at Twitter.
