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On my site, I feel to increase rankings, I'm going to include categories including one that 80+% visitors seems to want. As a result, I will need to include that category in the important HTML tags.

For example, on an image page representing bloke party venue (which is a local nightclub), my title tag is currently something like this:

 Bloke picture n - saturday may 28, 2016

To allow me some flexibility, I feel that I need to trim the names of some party venue names to allow more space for a better title. For example, I feel changing "Luxy entertainment complex" to "Luxy" might be a wise solution but I hope the venue owners wont freak. lol.

Anyways, my question is, if I include the category name in the title in brackets, would the brackets make the name completely different, or will they be ignored?

Here's my before titles for some images:

 Bloke picture n - saturday september 28, 2016
 Oko Blu picture n - saturday september 28, 2016
 Luxy Entertainment Complex picture n - saturday september 28, 2016

Here's my proposed titles for some images (what I intend to change them to):

 Bloke (nightclub) picture n - saturday september 28, 2016
 Oko Blu (lounge) picture n - saturday september 28, 2016
 Luxy (nightclub) picture n - saturday september 28, 2016

Yes, I spelled Blue wrong but that is deliberate because it is part of the name.

Based on my first example, If I made the above changes to my titles, would google think I'm trying to rank for "(nightclub)" or "nightclub" in one title?

If the answer is "(nightclub)", then could I use different characters in place of the parentheses that makes the word inside it stand out as a category which Google wouldn't include with the word when I'm trying to rank for the word?

P.S. My titles might be oddish but I'm trying to keep within the 65-character limit while making it informative.

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    Brackets look ugly... also brackets and parentheses has never really been truly proven to help (CTR), several years ago I researched this and my findings were that there is not enough strong evidence (low scale studies) to support the idea. There is however 'Strong Evidence' to support starting titles with numbers... i.e 30 Awesome Images of Luxy Night Club increases CTR, that's because people can associate the amount of content before clicking. I believe Google treats brackets as parentheses.
    – Simon Hayter
    Jul 3, 2016 at 16:50
  • The reason why I ask is because 80% of organic searchers always include nightclub to the name of the party venue even if some of them are actually smaller lounges instead of nightclubs, so somehow I have to include the category name to the venue name in the title without making it sound like the category is part of the venue name when it actually isnt.
    – Mike -- No longer here
    Jul 3, 2016 at 19:10
  • I just wanted to add that google is a weird beast. I used the query "bloke nightclub" and my site comes in at #10. The third entry is "bloke lounge" with Toronto in parenthesis. And some entries above mine don't even have "nightclub" mentioned.
    – Mike -- No longer here
    Jul 3, 2016 at 19:38
  • Lounge and nightclub are likely synonyms in an ontology that Google uses so you may still see search results for one return the other. The parentheses should be ignored by google. As the one answer addresses, some characters should not be used, however, parentheses should not be in that list and can be somewhat common in some corridors.
    – closetnoc
    Sep 10, 2019 at 1:10

2 Answers 2

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I have seen curly brackets break titles in sitelinks, but not elsewhere.

For example, as of today (20190905), if one googles "cal poly student affairs", one may see the sitelink titled "The He{a}" for a page that is actually titled "The He{a}rd At Cal Poly - Student Affairs - Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo".

cal+poly+student+affairs

This is not true for the normal search result in Google's rankings.

enter image description here

I have tested a other non-alphanumeric characters in titles, but have never seen any others causing problems in Google search results.

I encountered no issues with the full title being scraped/parsed using a variety of other common crawlers including Screaming Frog SEO spider, and with a wide variety of python (requests, urllib, Scrapy) and R packages (httr, Rcrawler, rvest)

The other characters I tested for: ([)]*^$!+~

(Note that it is generally considered a bad practice to use many non-alphanumeric characters in page titles that are used in URLs.)

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    Thanks for sharing your experience. Cheers!!
    – closetnoc
    Sep 10, 2019 at 1:11
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I can't place my hands on any official documents confirming this but in my experience Google doesn't seem to treat words in brackets or parentheses any differently to words not in brackets or parentheses.

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