Google Says Emojis Don’t Hurt SEO. But Should You Use Them In Your Content? 😐

Attention all SEO professionals: John Mueller struck again.

This time, our favorite Google Search Advocate brought words of wisdom regarding the presence of emojis in webpage titles, meta descriptions, and the content itself. 

He said that if you want to use them, go ahead. Emojis will neither harm nor help your SEO strategies.

Mueller revealed this update during the Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout from January 28. And although it was an interesting fact to know, one question remained in my head.

You can include emojis in your pages, but should you really do that? 

Here are two points to consider:

1: Using emojis can be a waste of your time 🤡

Yes, they are cute and funny. But since emojis will not do anything to help you rank high on the SERPs, what is the point of using them?

As an SEO professional, you do not want to dedicate valuable hours optimizing pages for things that will not bring positive results.

Plus, the SERP is always changing. If Google simply decides to stop showing emojis in searches, all your great work with them can be replaced with weird code information or blank squares □.

On top of it all, Google’s algorithm is already rewriting a significant number of page titles simply because it thinks it can create better headlines than you. 

This means that your precious emoji in the title can vanish or become something else, according to Mueller: 

“We don’t show all of these [emojis] in the search results, especially if we think that it kind of disrupts the search results in terms of, it looks misleading perhaps, or those kinds of things. But you can definitely keep them there, it’s not that they cause any problems. 

I don’t think you would have any significant advantage in putting those there, because at most what we try to figure out what is the equivalent of that emoji and maybe use that word as well, kind of associated with the page.”