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Emoji Title Tag Spam Won’t Be Shown in Google Search Results Soon

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google emoji spamEmojis in Google search result titles will be disappearing soon according to John Mueller in today’s Google Webmaster Hangout.

The question was raised about the new emojis showing up in the titles of Google search results, and even John admitted he liked them when he first saw them, but of course that quickly changed.

I thought that looked really cool when I saw the first pages that were using that, but I think it’s really easy to over do that, so I think it’s something we’ll take action on it at some point.

By taking action, I don’t think that we will manually demote the sites using it, but we’ll have to just filter those symbols out of the search results.

We do that already for an amount of existing Unicode symbols already so that’s something I imagine we will be expanding that list over time.

So it’s definitely not something I’d recommend as a strategy going forward, not something I’d recommend putting a lot of energy into to adding this into your site.  It’s a lot of work and essentially soon they just won’t be shown at all.  So it’s like a waste of time, you might as well focus on things that will give you long term results to improve the quality of your site overall rather than just mess with the snippets.

So good news, if you have gone ahead and added them to your titles, you won’t be penalized for doing so.  But do be aware that we don’t know exactly what they will be changed to, or if they will simply be stripped from the title tags completely.

It isn’t surprising that John says they won’t be shown at all sometime soon.  I anticipated it as soon as a big brand like Expedia began using them.

How soon will be see them gone?  I expect the emojis will be gone by this week.  They also just started showing up in Bing search results too, so it will be interesting to see if they follow suit and remove them as well.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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