Some people are getting really creative in order to stand out in Google search results. Check out these results from Google. Look at the second or third result set down. See the big honking arrow bullet thing in front of the “NETFLIX Free Trial - Coupon - Netflicks Offer Code” result? Really stands out, doesn’t it? It’s simply a “►” in their TITLE tag. Smart, isn’t it? I don’t know which browsers will be able to display this (maybe all?), but here’s a screen shot in case it doesn’t work for you:
A question: why are these obnoxious advertisements ranked so high in Google anyway? Maybe Google should assign "arrow bullets in title tags" a couple negative points in their Pagerank calculation.
People have been doing that on Craigslist for a while. I'm surprised Google doesn't try harder to filter that kind of thing.
Never trust a URL with 2 or more dashes in it, I always say. It seems all my travel related searches end up at something like "name-of-city-hotel-deals.com".
Similar: http://www.mario-fischer.de/mario_fischer.html
He has got Stars (★) in his title...
~T
Mario Fischer seems to be a funny guy - his homepage says that he's professor for "visitor-magnetizing". Achtung - could be dangerous...
Well, nothing but a space visible in Safari 1.0, thanks for the screenshot :))
Thanks for the mention trout, but the more interesting URL (for the above spam page and utility for MT users) is this one: Comment Spam Clearinghouse.
I think I'll stand out by being (in about two months) the only one without it.
Jimmying Google results, standing out, and getting people to visit has become more important than creating a site worth visiting.
There are a ton of these buggers. Here is a nice list of all the kooky characters you can use.
I think this will be recognised as unfair practice by Google (and hopefully other search engines) before long, and either penalised or (less harmfully) simply stripped of the offending characters.
It does nothing to change my disdain of Netflix, who used to be frequent comment spammers on my blog (their advertising affiliates, anyway).
The dude who posted the instructions for installing multiple versions of IE/Win (http://www.insert-title.com/web_design/?page=articles/dev/multi_IE) has four humongous stars in his title.
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