The Effect of Registered and Trade Marks on SEO

The other day at work we came upon an interesting question. Do using symbols like ®, ™, and © affect your SEO ratings?

It’s an interesting question. In other words, will searching for “coke” vs “coke®” yield different results.

It turns out they don’t. As we expected, Google simply drops the symbols in the name. They’re probably taking them out because they’re assuming most users can’t type them into a search engine.

Sadly, this issue arose while trying to do a search to see if more people used the ® mark vs not using it on certain registered terms. I’m still uncertain if it has to be used in every instance or if it’s just ok to use it once or mention it at the bottom of a page. If anybody knows the official rules on this please let me know.

Similarly, it’s also impossible to use a current search engine to see the amount of results for “Internet” compared to “internet” (anybody who knows me knows I’m totally against capitalizing words like internet and web)

If you know how to do searches that care about case please let me know… I’d really like to see the answer.

June 10th, 2007