Should I use pipes or dashes in my titles?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: We have a question from Blind Five Year Old in San Francisco, California. Blind Five Year Old asks, “Does Google have any suggestions (or data) on the impact of pipes versus dashes in the title tag?” I think they’re both need separators, so I think either one should be fine. Dashes are a lot more common, and so, I think that we definitely handle dash as well. I would expect that we handle pipes as well. You might see a little bit of impact in terms of how users would Click-Through. But I doubt that you’d see it very much. So you could probably run a little A, B tests where you had, you know, 20 pages with pipes and 20 pages with dashes and see if people tend to click on the pipes more or the dashes more. I’d be a little surprised if users really notice that much. But essentially, both should work and there shouldn’t be any major differences between using the vertical pipes versus the horizontal dashes.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: