Registered Trademark Symbol in Title Tag

[apozielli]

I have just recently added a registered trademark symbol in my title tags (®).

In just a month, all of my optimized keywords have dropped listings from the top 3 pages in Google.

Would the addition of the trademark symbol have effected this?

[mtb167]

Doubt it.

Is there a space in between the trademark symbol and the keyword? That might help so that the engines no unequivocally that its not part of your word...

but i doubt it.

Something else is probably happening.

[gobeyond]

My rule of thumb is this: use ONLY the words that people are searching. No one searches the word Kodak with a "R" or "TM", so there is aboslutely no need to waste precious space in the title tag.

It is very hard to tell though with the extra stuff can cost you ranking positions, but you can't rule it out either since your rankings dropped after you added it.

I'd remove them ASAP and see what happens.