Hello!
As you might’ve noticed before you edited your topic, - converts correctly to a hyphen 🙂
The <title> tag is an “escalable raw text element“, which means it can contain any HTML entity. But, it’s a “normal element” in XHTML, which means we should escape its contents, just to be sure. This causes a host of issues we had to resolve–one method we use is “texturization”, which transforms some entities to other ones to preserve their meaning.
But, one of these transformations converts a hyphen to a dash:
Hyphen: -
Dash: –
So, we use this special - entity to bypass that transformation, without losing its meaning. It should not have any effect on the SERP display or even your browser tab’s title output.
As for the sitemap not displaying all links–make sure all posts you want in there are indexable and can be marked up via The SEO Framework.
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This reply was modified 5 years, 12 months ago by
Sybre Waaijer. Reason: Even bbPress has its texturization issues
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This reply was modified 5 years, 12 months ago by
Steven Stern (sterndata).
Thread Starter
jon182
(@brody182)
you need a hyphen in the page title “‐” it needs to display like this “-” in the source code otherwise google can’t read it.
Google can read HTML entities and uses UTF-8 decoding; nowadays, they can even render and interpret JavaScript.
Here is a depiction of a recently indexed article with the - entity:

You can try it yourself with this real-world example query:
site:https://theseoframework.com/em-changelog/2-4-0-linguistic-seo/
If you have examples where this doesn’t work as intended, please do share the links. Thank you!