Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do search engines understand special/foreign characters?
-
We carry a few brands that have special foreign characters, e.g., Kühl, Lolë, but do search engines recognize special unicode characters? Obviously we would want to spend more energy optimizing keywords that potential customers can type with a keyboard, but is it worthwhile to throw in some encoded keywords and anchor text for people that copy-paste these words into a search?
Do search engines typically equate special characters to their closest English equivalent, or are "Kuhl", "Kühl" and "Kühl" three entirely different terms?
-
Thanks Tom.
While it seems that search engines generally handle these characters well I still had to ask because I did two Google searches: One for "lole" and another for "lolë", and I got very different results. On the first search my website came up on SERP page one but on the second one we were nowhere to be found on any of the first 15 pages.
Whats more, every one of the first 10 SERP pages or so contained at least one instance of the character with an accent in the title, description, or within the on-page copy. So it seems that special characters and regular ascii characters are not one in the same, or at least they are not weighted the same.
I do have to agree with you on the fact that most users will not go through the trouble entering Alt codes on their search bars. On the other hand, the fact that we barely register on SERPs for the company's DBA name might be cause for some concern.
-
Hi David,
Google/Bing etc. have very few problems recognising such characters in the Latin alphabet. It looks like you are mainly concerned with umlauts, which Google handles intelligently. For example...
-
Google will identify the difference between a search for "Küchen" (kitchens in German) and "Kuchen" (cake in German) and offer up relevant results. This is true in Google US and Google UK, not just localised Googles.
-
Search suggestions work just fine with these characters, and even with the standardised way of rewriting them when there is no accessible way to type them (for umlauts this is with an e following the letter). For example, in Google.de, type "Kue" and you will be given the suggestion "Küchen".
You are mainly concerned with brands, which muddies the waters a little because many people in English speaking markets won't bother/know how to type the umlauts. However, Google normally handles this well and recognises the intent.
I would recommend you ensure you consistent use the brand name with the foreign characters, as intended. Google/Bing and co. shouldn't have any problems. Which HTML encoding you use is by the by, in my opinion, as long as the characters are rendering correctly.
-
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
-
Ogranization Schema/Microformat for a content/brand website | Travel
Hi, One of our clients have a website specific to a place, for eg. California Tourism in which they publish local information related to tourism, blogs & other useful content. I want to understand how useful is to publish Organization Schema on such website mentioning the actual Organization, which in this case is a Travel Agency? Or any other schema would fit in for such websites?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ds9.tech0 -
Bulk reverse image search?
Hi, i have a couple fashion clients who have very active blogs and post lots of fashion content and images. Like 50+ images weekly. I want to check if these images have been used by other sources in bulk, are there any good reverse image search tools which can do this? Or any recommended ways to efficiently do this for a large number of images? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | snj_cerkez0 -
Intro to programming/coding for seo
Hello, I am currently a SEO and am looking for an Intro to programming/coding course to help me implement various technical SEO tasks for my clients and the business-as the programming dept will not help me, as they do not see the value of SEO. Could someone pls recommend an online course that would introduce me to basic concepts and also specifically, the information that would help me to enhance our SEO? I would also like to better understand APIs. Thanks so much in advance for your help! Lauren
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer1 -
Why is our pagerank is still only 3/10?
Hi, Our site https://soundbetter.com has been live for 2 years now, and as of yet we haven't yet been able to get our PageRank above 3/10. We have thousands of unique pages and plenty of original contextual content, we avoid duplicate content best we can, follow google's best practices for site structure, deal with any issues that come up in webmaster tools, have schema.org markup, avoid link spamming, have inbound links from authority sites (though OSE doesn't show most of them for some reason), lots of social shares to our pages and the domain has been owned by us for 12 years. Any thoughts on why we would still have a PR of 3? Thanks for helping
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ShaqD0 -
My website (non-adult) is not appearing in Google search results when i have safe search settings on. How can i fix this?
Hi, I have this issue where my website does not appear in Google search results when i have the safe search settings on. If i turn the safe search settings off, my site appears no problem. I'm guessing Google is categorizing my website as adult, which it definitely is not. Has anyone had this issue before? Or does anyone know how to resolve this issue? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CupidTeam0 -
Why is Google Displaying this image in the search results?
Hi i'm looking at advice on how to remove or change a particular image Google is displaying in the search results. I have attached a screenshot. From the first look of it, i assumed the image would be related and be on the dealers Google+ Local Page: https://plus.google.com/118099386834104087122/about?hl=en But there are no photos. The image seems to be coming from the website. Is there a way to stop Google from displaying this image or making them display a totally different image. Thanks, Chris XzfsnUy.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mattcarter080 -
301 redirect with /? in URL
For a Wordpress site that has the ending / in the URL with a ? after it... how can you do a 301 redirect to strip off anything after the / For example how to take this URL domain.com/article-name/?utm_source=feedburner and 301 to this URL domain.com/article-name/ Thank you for the help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | COEDMediaGroup0 -
Article Marketing / Article Posting
I am working on the SEO on a few different websites and I have built out an article marketing campaign so that I can get high quality backlinks for my website. I have been writing the content myself and I have been manually building out the top Web 2.0, Article Directory, and Doc Sharing sites. today I was creating an account on squidoo and I wondered if it mattered if I had the username be one of two things: my keyword as a user name, like: [keyword+geotag] example: roofinghouston just my first and last name as the username (or just a username I always use) (The reason behind #1 would be to have the optimized keyword and location I am trying to rank for, inside of the username. The reason for #2 would be that I don't want to get into trouble by having "too much" optimization.) I know a bit about optimization and that getting your keyword out there is great in a lot of areas, but I am not sure if it looks "suspicious" if I have my username be the keyword+geotag. I am just worried that all of this hard work will be torn down if I look like I'm trying too hard to be optimized, etc etc. There is no one answer, I am mainly looking for shared experiences. If you do have a definite answer, then I would like that too 🙂 Thanks SEOMoz!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOWizards0