For God’s sake, DO NOT use Emojis in Your Headline!
It is a bad practice and I will tell you why. 😎
So don’t get me wrong — I ❤️ Emojis.
👍 I think most of the time they are a great way to make your stories and articles stand out. It makes them more attractive, and alive and grabs more eye-ball attention of the readers.
But when it comes to the headlines and titles... DO NOT use them! ⛔
Why, oh, why ❓
So roughly one month ago, when I was just starting out on Medium, I published my first two stories:
And as you can see, both of them have emojis (😂🖤😎) in their headline/title.
My hope was (and still is) that the second article about Skillshare will be indexed by Google/Bing and I will start receiving some traffic from SEO.
From my previous experience, I knew that SEO is a tricky thing and indexing can take months, years, or even never-gonna-happen at all.
So yesterday, I checked what is going on with my Medium blog on Google and Bing:
😲 And I was very surprised! While my older (almost one-month-old) emoji-titled stories were not indexed, my brand-new story was indexed almost instantly (a couple of hours after publishing).
✅ I checked my other most recent articles and they were indexed too! So I came to this conclusion:
⛔ Don’t use Emojis in your Medium stories headline, because search engines do not like them and your indexing time will be slower. In my opinion, you can safely use them on your content, but not in the title or headline.
In other words, Google and Bing will say to you…
…when you will try to use emojis in your headline or title. 🙃
That’s it for now. Peace! ✌️
Note #1: From what I have observed, not many Medium stories use emojis in their headlines. So maybe Medium gurus have already found out about this thing earlier. But I just wanted to share with you my own, personal and honest experience about that. 🧐
Note #2: I don’t receive much internal traffic from Medium yet, so I can’t say for sure, but it seems that Medium’s algorithm does not “punish” stories with emojis. It seems that it does not care about that, because, in my case, internal traffic is low either way — with or without emojis. 😅
Note #3: I have removed the emoji icon from the title of my Skillshare story and will inform you if it helps with the SEO indexing.🤞