Google Will Stop Displaying Emoji Symbols In The Search Results

Wave goodbye to Emoji symbols in the Google search results, at least in Google’s desktop search results.

A couple weeks ago Google began displaying Emojis on desktop search results and then publishers, like Expedia, began testing to see if adding Emoji symbols to their title tags and snippets would increase click through rates from Google’s organic results or not.

Since then, many other webmasters jumped on board and started adding emojis to their titles, ultimately leading to Google’s search results pages being somewhat overrun by cute and funny emoji symbols.

Google’s John Mueller said yesterday in a Google+ Hangout that they will be removed from the search results soon. He said just like Google dropped unicode symbols back in 2003, Google will drop Emoji symbols from being displayed in the search results. It does not mean your web pages with emojis will be penalized, it does mean Google will simply stop showing the Emojis in the search results.

He said this around the 51:30 mark in the video, here is the video for you to view his response. But in short, he said don’t waste your time adding emojis to your pages, they will be dropping them soon.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.