Is It OK to Use Emojis in Meta Tags?

I wrote this post in Spanish in 2022 and adapted it to English in 2026.

Today I'm going to talk about how Google uses NLP and tokenization to understand the content you're handing it to be indexed.

This post started as an answer to a good friend of mine, who asked me whether it was a problem to put emojis in the meta tags without spaces around them.

The short answer is: no.

The long answer is tokenization and the Natural Language Processing Google uses, called BERT.

Let's dig into the long answer.

What Is Natural Language Processing (NLP)? #

Give or take a few words, we can define it as machines trying to understand human language.

We humans can talk to machines thanks to programming languages.

There are different types of programming languages:

High-level languages: they're easy for humans to understand. For example: Python.

Low-level languages: not one specific language, more a group of them, where the lowest is binary code.

There are also so-called mid-level languages, but for what we care about here, it's enough to know that the lowest level a human can go to talk to a computer is binary code.

Binary code is sets of zeros and ones that, in sequence, turn into specific orders for the computer.

These orders tell it: if it's 1, there's voltage, and if it's 0, there's no voltage.

It's that simple.

Voltage or no voltage: that's the basis of the logic gates that make computing possible.

Notice anything in particular?

It's very easy for us to get down to the lowest level we can use to talk to a machine.

Of course it is, we invented them, heh.

The real problem is when they try to talk to us, or understand what we've said without a programming language.

Artificial intelligence and NLP

Artificial intelligence has made it possible for machines to understand what we're saying, even when we're not using a programming language.

Try it with Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant.

You can talk to them, and these AIs will understand you.

That last one, Google Assistant, is the one I'm going to focus on from here on, because it's this same artificial intelligence that makes it possible to understand what users search for.

Google BERT and NLP

Google BERT was an update to Google's algorithm built to help users who make ambiguous searches, or searches that are too specific.

These overly specific searches are also called "long tail".

What Google achieved with this was to start reading keywords in context instead of running exact-match searches.

It changed SEO forever and gave birth to what we now know as semantic SEO.

What nobody saw coming is that it would lay the groundwork for what was later called the "Google title update".

A very peculiar update where Google now decides what your page's title is in the search results, based on what will best satisfy the user's search intent.

Okay, so now we know Google not only understands keywords in context, it can also write the meta title as it sees fit, based on your content.

Now let's see what this whole tokenization thing is about.

What Is Tokenization in NLP, and How Does It Affect SEO? #

When you "tokenize" a string of text, you split it into all its parts.

That way you can separate prices, dates, emojis and other characters, even when there are no spaces between the pieces that make up the text.

Let's see what this is about, and how it affects SEO, with a practical example.

Say you want to write a post to rank for this keyword: best coffee makers for home 2022

You could design a meta title like this:

The 10 Best Coffee Makers for Home【2022】

There's no space between the word "Home" and the emoji "【", because the space you see comes with the emoji itself.

On top of that, a "10" has snuck in between "The" and "Best".

If you're worried that Google now won't understand that you're really trying to rank for "best coffee makers for home 2022", let me tell you you're worrying about nothing.

The most basic NLP technique is tokenization, and this meta title, tokenized, would look like this:

"The", "10", "Best", "Coffee", "Makers", "for", "Home", "【", "2022", "】"

Spaces don't show up anywhere, and it's extremely easy for the artificial intelligence to understand that you're using a mix of numbers and letters to form words.

The "10" is a quantity, the "2022" is a date, and the emojis can go where the sun don't shine, because they don't belong to any language and wouldn't add meaning to the sentence even if they were taken into account.

So there you go: use emojis like there's no tomorrow. At the end of the day, Google couldn't give a flying chicken whether you use them or not, but users will get an interesting visual effect that can boost your CTR in the SERPs.