Url for Turkish, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese and Arabic websites

[AymanH]

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 !

[salesnutseo]

6 Months later how well does it do ?

[AymanH]

So what I did is:

Arabic, Turkish, Russian and Vietnamese URL are 100% translated. For chineses I followed my traductor advise and make in in Pinyin which is supposed to be the latin version of the chinese characters.

Let see how does google, Bing & Yandex like our website now !

[AymanH]

Based on your previous answer I gonna translate them for a while and see how it's going on.

I think it's a good idea to translate all the URL as our main website is in English and all other are translations.

Never easy to go for those kind of projects.

Tks a lot !

[TomRayner]

The majority of websites I have seen that are for non-Latin language websites, such as Greek and the examples you give, have used URLs using the latin alphabet.  Some of the URLs are spelt phonetically, others just use the English equivalent term.

I always like to look at news sites for these regions and see what URL format they use for these.  If you look at http://www.newsru.com for Russia, http://alhayat.com/ for Saudi Arabia, you can see the format I mentioned being used.

Now, interestingly, the exception I keep seeing seems to be Wikipedia.  Here is their Chinese (simplified) site: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/ - click on a link there and you get Chinese characters in the URL.

But just look what happens when you try and copy-paste the raw URL: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%89%A9%E7%90%86%E5%AD%A6 - you get this code instead of the characters.  To me (albeit as a Westerner) this could cause problems when linking.

Ultimately, looking at just SEO, if you use latin or local characters it won't be the deciding factor for your performance.  From a user experience point of view, you could make an argument for both cases.  It certainly won't look out of place if you use latin characters in the URL as that is just the way of the web and indeed the majority of the websites in these regions use such a format.  I'd have a look at websites in that region that are related to what you're looking at and see what structure they use.  They might use English denominated URLs, or they might give latin-spelled, phonetic URLs (Greece is noticeable for doing this - they spell the word in latin characters as how it would be pronounced in Greek, something I like to call Greeklish).  Make your decision based on the user experience, but when doing so take heed of the sites already out there and how they're approaching it and you won't go too far wrong.

Hope this helps.

[FedeEinhorn]

That's also possible.

Check this post: http://uxmag.com/articles/a-url-in-any-language

In any language they will work fine due to Internationalized Resource Identifiers, when you copy paste them they might look weird because of that, but they will still work in a browser.

Edit: offering the URL also translated will be helpful for SEO too. Imagine a user searching for your site in their language, they will probably click on the one that it's written in their language that on the the one that has an English URL.

[AymanH]

Hello

Tks for this answer. You're totally right for all latin languages, but what about the other ones ?

[simon_realbuzz]

Definitely go for translating the URLs into their relevant languages. This was discussed in a previous thread which is worth looking at.