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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Switch to Separate URL Configurations for International SEO?
We run an ecommerce website and sell to customers in the US and Canada. We recently realized that the way we serve content to our users isn't Google's recommended way. We use locale-adaptive pages in that some content changes slightly depending on where we think the user is located based on their IP address. But the URL doesn't change. Google's stance on locale-adaptive - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en&ref_topic=2370587 That being said, the changes are quite minor. It is usually only pricing and currency that changes depending on if we determine the user to be based in Canada or the US. However, I understand that there can be problems related to this configuration because of GoogleBot primarily using a US-based IP. We decided that the best course of action for us is to serve US content as our default content on all of our existing URLs. And Canadian content would be served using new url paths such as: example.com**/en-ca/**product1. All of this would also be configured to use hreflang tags. The problem we have run into is that it is a pretty huge development challenge to reconfigure how the site serves content when we have been using locale-adaptive for over a year. So developer resources would be taken away from other tasks and put toward this one for a relatively long time. Based on this information and the fact that we would like to both rank better in Canada and to follow Google's recommendations, how important would you say this change would be? I realize this isn't a black and white question and it depends a lot on business goals and preferences. However, I need to be able to gauge as best as I can how necessary it is to do this in order to make the decision of whether to do it or not. Any input is greatly appreciated!
International SEO | | westcoastcraig1 -
How To Proceed With Int'l Language Targeting if Subfolders Not An Option?
I’m currently working with my team to sort out the best way to build out the international versions of our website. Any advice on how to move forward is greatly appreciated! Current Setup: Subdirectories to target languages - i.e. domain.com/es/. We chose this because… We are targeting languages not countries Our product offering does not change from country to country Translated site content is almost identical to the english version Current Problem: Our site is built on WordPress and our database can’t handle the build out of 4 more international versions of the site. The database is slowing down and our site speed is being affected for multiple reasons (WordPress multilingual plugin being one of them). **What to do next? **My developers have said that we cannot continue with our current subdirectory structure due to the technical infrastructure issues I’ve mentioned above (as well as others I’m yet to get full details on). Now I’m left with a decision: Change to a subdomain structure Change to a ccTLD structure Is there an option 3? From what I’ve read it does not make sense to build out language targeted sites on a ccTLD structure because that limits the ability for people outside of the targeted country to find the content organically. I.e. a website at www.domain.es is targeted to searchers in Spain so someone in Columbia is less likely to find that content through the engines. Is this correct? If so, how much can it hurt organic discovery? What’s the optimal setup to move forward with in this case? Thanks!
International SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
Thai Characters in URL's
Does anyone have experience with non-Latin characters in URL's? We've launched a website in Thailand and picked Thai characters for URL's. However, when you copy it, it turns into something like this: http://www.imoneythailand.com/บัตรเครดิต Can it impact our website's crawlability? Also, is keyword in URL a ranking factor for non-Latin languages? Thanks in advance for help!
International SEO | | imoney0 -
Sub-domains or sub-directories for country-specific versions of the site?
What approach do you think would be better from an SEO perspective when creating country-targeted versions for an eCommerce site (all in the same language with slight regional changes) - sub-domains or sub-directories? Is any of the approaches more cost effective, web development-wise? I know this topic's been under much debate and I would really like to hear your opinion. Many thanks!
International SEO | | ramarketing0 -
Country-specific SEO
Hi, my client offers courses that whilst based in Manchester, England are mainly attended by people in countries such as Georgia, Libya and Nigeria etc. The people that attend the courses are fluent in English. We're looking at performing country-specific SEO and I have a few queries. The plan so far: Obtain TLD's in each target country. These TLD's would be hosted on the same server as the core site based in England. Option 1: Each TLD would be a microsite with content specific to the country including geo-signals, in English. Option 2: Each TLD would 301 redirect to the core site, i.e. example.sa redirects to example.com/sa/ and this country-specific section would have relevant geo-signals. So I have 3 questions at this point: 1. Most-all of the tips I have seen about country-specific SEO assume that the content should be translated to the native tongue although in this case, the audience are fluent English speaks. Does this make a difference? Is it okay to use English and still be able to rank in country-specific search engines? 2. Between options 1 & option 2 - which would be the optimum setup? 3. Last question, if we obtain the TLD's I hear that it's not necessary to also host that TLD in the target country, is this right? Thanks.
International SEO | | lokito0 -
Best domain for spanish language site targeting ALL spanish territories?
hi, we're have a strong .com domain and are looking to launch a site for spanish speakers (ie latin america + spain). we already have various subdirectories for some foreign language sites (eg. ourdomain.co.uk, us.ourdomain.com, ca.ourdomain.com, ourdomainchina.com, ourdomainindia.com etc) we already have a B2B site ourdomain.com-es which will remain the same. I'm thinking best practice would be to launch translated copy for the following: ourdomain.com/es ourdomain.com/cl ourdomain.com/mx ourdomain.com/pt etc etc firstly is this the best option? secondly, i'm really interested to hear whether there is a less time/resource intensive route that would give us visibility in ALL spanish speaking territories? Also - if we go with just one of the above (eg ourdomain.com/cl) how likely are we to get traction in other spanish speaking territories? any help much appreciated!
International SEO | | KevinDunne0 -
Http://us.burberry.com/: Big traffic change for top URL (error 593f1ceb2d67)
Please forgive duplicating this question on the SEOMoz & Webmaster Tools forum but I'm hoping to hit both audiences with this question... A few days ago I noticed that our US homepage (us.burberry.com) had dropped from PR5 to PR0, and the page has been deindexed by Google. After checking Webmaster Tools I also received the following message: http://us.burberry.com/: Big traffic change for top URL April 2, 2012Search results clicks for http://us.burberry.com/ have decreased significantly.Message ID: 593f1ceb2d67.We're not doing any link building at all (we've enough on-site issues to deal with). The only changes I have made are adding Google Analytics to the website, uploading sitemaps via Webmaster Tools (it's not linked to from robots.txt yet), and setting the burberry.com and www.burberry.com geo-location settings to 'unlisted' (we want uk.burberry.com appearing in the UK results, us.burberry.com appearing in the US results etc rather than www.burberry.com).I've reversed the geo-location settings but I doubt this would have caused this. We've duplicate copies of our homepage (such as us.burberry.com/store//) from typos in inbound links (and bad programming that allows them to work rather than 404'ing) but I don't think any of this is new. What I don't understand is (a) why this is happening now and (b) why is this just affecting our US homepage? We've ~40 different duplicates of the homepage (us, uk, ca, pt, ro, sk etc etc) so why is the US site being affected and not the others? Does anyone know if this is due to an algorithm change by Google or something else all together? Background:Our website www.burberry.com has 46 subdomains such as uk.burberry.com, ca.burberry.com and us.burberry.com. There is a lot of duplicate content on each subdomain (including basic things like tracking parameters in URLs) and across subdomains (uk.burberry.com/store & us.burberry.com/store are exactly the same), there's very little text on the site (its nearly all images), as well as poor redirects, inaccessible content (AJAX/Flash) and a whole host of basic SEO things that aren't being done correctly. I've joined the company in the last few months and have started addressing these issues but I've got a LOT of work to do yet.One thing that we have in our favour is a link profile that is as clean and natural as they come - there was only ever one link building campaign performed (which was before my time) and I had all of those links removed as soon as I joined the company.Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for your timeDean RoweEdit: us.burberry.com 301 redirects to us.burberry.com/store/ as explained on the webmaster tools forum, but I don't believe this is the cause as its the same across all subdomains.
International SEO | | FashionLux0 -
De-Indexing URLs from a specific Locale
Is it possible to de-index a specific URL from showing up in a specific locale? For example, if I want to de-index http://www.example.com/category/product1 from http://www.google.co.uk but not http://www.google.com, is that possible?
International SEO | | craigsmith3330