The use of foreign characters and capital letters in URL's?

[wdziedzic]

Hello all,

We have 4 language domains for our website, and a number of our Spanish landing pages are written using Spanish characters - most notably: ñ and ó.

We have done our research around the web and realised that many of the top competitors for keywords such as Diseño Web (web design) and Aplicaión iPhone (iphone application) DO NOT use these special chacracters in their URL structure.

Here is an example of our URL's

EX:  http://www.twago.es/expert/Diseño-Web/Diseño-Web

However when I simply copy paste a URL that contains a special character it is automatically translated and encoded.

EX: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone

(When written out long had it appears: http://www.twago.es/expert/Aplicación-iPhone/Aplicación-iPhone

My first question is, seeing how the overwhelming majority of website URL's DO NOT contain special characters (and even for Spanish/German characters these are simply written using the standard English latin alphabet) is there a negative effect on our SEO rankings/efforts because we are using special characters?

• When we write anchor text for backlinks to these pages we USE the special characteristics in the anchor text (so does most other competitors). Does the anchor text have to exactly

I know most webbrowsers can understand the special characters, especially when returning search results to users that either type the special characters within their search query (or not). But we seem to think that if we were doing the right thing, then why does everyone else do it differently?

My second question is the same, but focusing on the use of Capital letters in our URL structure.

NOTE: When we do a broken link check with some link tools (such as xenu) the URL's that contain the special characters in Spanish are marked as "broken". Is this a related issue?

Any help anyone could give us would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

David from twago

[ASOS]

Hi,

We have 4 foreign language sites, one in spanish and just remove the special characters in all and rank very highly, so there is no harm in doing this, it actually makes it harder.

I would stick with all lower cases or at least have the same logic in the URL - as long as it is consistent, then no biggie.

No matter what you do, make sure if you make changes to any of this that you 301 all of the old pages to their new version otherwise you will be starting from scratch!

Hope this helps.