John Mueller of Google said that Google, for ranking and SEO purposes, ignores all symbols – including the registered trademark symbols such as ® and ™.

The question came up in the webmaster hangout at the 51:03 mark where someone asked:

John answered they ignore them:

Of course, yes you can search for them in Google. Try it yourself by searching for [®] or [™].

Forum discussion at YouTube.

This post was scheduled to go live today but was written earlier – I am currently offline today.