A couple weeks ago, Google began showing Emoji characters in desktop search results after years of showing them in the mobile results.
Surprise, surprise, Google will be dropping them soon from the search results - at least the desktop results. How soon? I don't know, but I'd say within a week.
Why are they dropping it, well webmasters have begun dressing up their title tags and snippets with them making the search results a cartoon mess. For example, Expedia tested emojis and I know many publishers have already as well.
Google's John Mueller in a Google+ hangout was asked this at 51:40 mark and answered they will be going away. He said "it is kind of a waste of time" since "soon they will not be shown at all."
Here is the video response:
Here is my best effort at transcribing it, it is hard to hear some words:
I thought that (Emojis in SERPs) looked really cool when I saw the first pages that were using that.But I think it is really easy to over do that and probably something we will take action on.
By taking action, I don’t think we will, like manually demote these sites that are using it, but rather we will figure out a way to filter those out of the search results.
We do that for a lot of existing unicode symbols already. So that is something that I imagine we’ll just be expanding that list over time.
So it’s definitely not something I’d recommend as a strategy going forward. Not something that I’d recommend like putting a lot of energy into and adding this into your websites.
It is a lot of work and essentially soon they will not be shown at all, so it is kind of a waste of time.
So you might as well focus on something that gives you more long term results.
Back in 2003 Google dropped the unicode symbols from showing in the SERPs as well - that was over 10 years ago!
💀 to emoji in the Google SERPs 💀
Forum discussion at Google+.
