Does the PIPE character | help or hurt SEO and TITLE tags?
Question 
Q: also, I never received an email from Jason in reference to a question I asked the other day. In our title tag we use | to separte our keywords. He said using commas is bad. Is it bad to use | as well? ex: Charlotte News | Weather | Carolina Panther
Answer: -
I think that the comma character is bad in terms of the TITLE tag. I think any long string of comma comma comma anywhere on the page is somewhat negative - it's just such an obvious list of keywords. So the PIPE character or | has many of the same characteristics. So I would not overdo it just one or two.
The BEST TITLE tags read almost like real sentences or headlines in a traditional print paper or magazine. What happens is that people get lazy and they just throw keywords in there (they realize that keywords matter) but then the TITLE tag itself looks like just a collection of keywords rather than a TITLE or HEADLINE and a) Google deprecates it and b) people do not click FROM Google to the website because the GOOGLE HEADLINE looks lame.
As a news organization, writing good, pithy TITLE tags to each and every post should be a HUGE priority. The HUFFINGTON POST is a master of this sort of thing - take a little time and browse HOW they write TITLE tags for their posts (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/).
Question 2, we addressed in class. Generally outbound links are NOT good, as you are leaking link juice. So you might rel='nofollow' them. There are definite negatives to a lot of outbound links.
Hope this helps!
- Jason McDonald
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