Should I include language specific characters in the URL?
-
So a client's site is to be set up like this:
domain.com
domain.co.uk
domain.de
domain.fr
domain.plThe question is, on the non english language sites, which would be more likely to rank?
or
Thanks!
-
Glad to be of help.
-
one useful answer by two people. Feels like a consensus!
-
Ah that's no problem at all - just happy you have a useful answer
Andy
-
Andy - wish I'd read your comment before I slapped up the reply to Adam! Thanks... clearly "great minds" and all that!
-
Good point Adam It looks like LSC appear quite frequently in the Page titles, but not the URLs. Kinda helps
-
Google is smart enough not to require language specific characters and I have worked with these in the past. You don't need them.
As suggested, test it yourself and you never see these characters in the results (just had a good search around). However, I would put them in Page Titles because at this point, you are down to text that people will be reading.
Andy
-
I guess the easiest thing to do would be to test it yourself.
Fo example, when I search [über] in Google.de (with German location settings), after a Google result for the number one position, the next 2 results have ueber in the URLs and not über.
Hope that helps,
Adam.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Mixed English and Arabic URLs
I'm currently working with a global brand who need localisation in each of their territories. They're operating on a single .com domain name, with different language versions in separate directories. Example:
International SEO | | Guyboz
domain.com/en/
domain.com/fr/
domain.com/ar/ We're using ahreflang tags to make sure Google shows the correct language version for each region. Now onto my question... As the domain is a .com with an English company name, when it comes to the Arabic version of the website, will having a completely mixed language URL like this be detrimental to the site's performance in searches from the middle east? Currently we're coming up with URLs like the following: domain.com/blog/عنوان بلوق عربية طويلة حقا على شيء مثير جدا للاهتمام Is this a bad thing?0 -
Url for Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese and Arabic websites
Hello ! We gonna release our next website with new amazing languages. However I was wondering, is it better to keep the url in English or I can translate them in : Turkish (should be fine) Chinese Arabic Vietnamese Arabic Russian All websites are properly translated but I'm hesitating for the url. Tks a lot !
International SEO | | AymanH0 -
Showing different content according to different geo-locations on same URL
We would like our website to show different content according to different Geo-locations (but in the same language). For example, if www.mywebsite.com is accessed from the US, it would show text (in English) appealing to North Americans, but, if accessed from Japan, it would show text (also in English) that appeals more to Japanese people. In the Middle East, we would like the website to show different images than those shown in the US and Asia. Our main concern is that we would like to keep the same URL. How will Google index these pages? Will it index the www.mywebsite.com (Japan version) in its Asia archives and the www.mywebsite.com (US version) in its North American archives? Will Google penalise us for showing different content across Geo-locations on the same URL? What if a URL is meant to show content only in Japan? Are there any other issues that we should be looking out for? Kindest Regards L.B.
International SEO | | seoec0 -
Multinational URLs
Hi I'm wondering if the following URL structure using subdirectories would be alright to use on a multinational site. I have local products only in the local language and english. I plan to use: /uk/ - UK product in English (geo target in GWT to UK, href lang="en") /fr/ - French product in French (would geo target this in GWT to France, and hreflang="fr-FR") /fr-en/ - French product in English (no geo-targeting, hreflang ="en") /de/ - German product in German (would geo target this in GWT to Germany, and hreflang="de-DE") /de-en/ - German product in English (no geo-targeting, hreflang ="en") /at-de/ - Austrian product in German (would geo target this in GWT to Austria, and hreflang="at-DE") /at-en/ - Austrian product in English (no geo-targeting, hreflang ="en") Does the name of the subfolder matter? I've tried to keep the URL's shorter, so german users in Germany would get just /de/ rather than /de-de/, and have made the english version of the content the more ugly URL as it's used much, much less. The URL structures aren't really consistent here (ie. uk and fr-en are for english content, but are different in URL format) but I'm wondering if this is an issue, or if the above would be fine. Thanks!
International SEO | | pikka0 -
E-Commerce site in 2 languages - Duplicate content or not?
How does Google view this? Our current site works like:
International SEO | | bjs2010
www.domain.com/EN - English
www.domain.com/ES - Spanish All products are the same, just different language and different URL for them - is this good or bad? I thought of either Going with .co.uk or .com for "English" and a .es for "Spanish"
OR Subdomaining it. www.es.domain.com and www.en.domain.com Any advice appreciated!0 -
Should product-pages with different currencies have different URLs?
Here is a question that should be of interest for small online merchants selling internationally in multiple currencies. When, based on geolocation, a product-page is served with different currencies, should a product-page have a different URL for each currency? Thanks.
International SEO | | AdrienOLeary0 -
SEO difficulty between languages?
Hello, I would like to know if there are certain factors that determine SEO difficulty between different languages or countries. Is doing SEO more difficult in Japan than in the United States? What would be some factors that could help determine the above? Thanks in advance,
International SEO | | SS-ose0 -
Do non-english(localized) URLs help Local SEO and user experience?
Hi Everyone, This question is about URL best practice for multilingual websites. We have www.example.com in English and we are building the exact replica of English site in German www.example.de. On the Geman site, we are considering to translate some portions of the URLs for example last folder and file name as seen below: example.de/folder1-in-english/folder2-in-english/folder3-in-german/filename-in-german.html Is this a good idea? Will this help SEO and user experience both? or the mixed languagues in URL will confuse the users? Google guidelines say that this should be ok. Would love to get feedback from SEOMOZ community! Thanks, Supriya.
International SEO | | Amjath0