Quick question... I'm curious what everyone's thoughts are pertaining to special characters in title/meta tags and how they're treated by the SE's. Let's say our title tag looks like this:

<title>BrandName® Widgets</title>

On the code side, we use the html code of ® to display the registered trademark symbol. Here are the questions...

1) In terms of character count, will the SE's count the trademark symbol as a character, or the html code as 5 characters? I'm not so much worried about character density, but if spiders only pick up a certain number of characters in a title tag, which characters do we count?

2) In terms of search ability, do these symbols interfere with evaluating keyword context, or are they generally ignored by spiders? Mostly we don't want to lose search ranking for the keyword "Widgets" if the modifier is viewed as "BrandName®" instead of "BrandName."

I'm assuming by HTML you mean ASCII? To my knowledge symbols still count as a word. Personally I wouldn't use a registration symbol in my TITLE because I don't think it is necessary or that users search for the symbol.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%26%23174%3B&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS271US272

I'm no legal expert and I'm by no means qualified to give legal advice but if nike.com, apple.com, louisvuitton.com, bose.com, walmart.com, microsoft.com, yahoo.com and legalzoom.com don't use registration symbols I'd wonder if they were really that important for me to use. Also some browsers may render the ASCII instead of the symbol and some engines may ignore Registration symbols. Either way, if you must use the R symbol in your TITLE element, I'd include a space between the word and symbol.

Perhaps someone else can enlighten us more on this issue?

I'm not so much worried about character density, but if spiders only pick up a certain number of characters in a title tag, which characters do we count?How many characters in the title element get spidered and indexed isn't the same as how many characters get displayed in the snippets before being truncated.

There are "different algos" for creating the snippets to display, which is query dependent.