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Is it good SEO to have URL's (page names) with non-english characters like Chinese names in URL's?

jpkeisala
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  • I did find out that there is an official transcription system called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin for Chinese. That means that there should not be any problems using ascii urls. But I am not sure if Google will then translate these kind of URL's? – jpkeisala Oct 06 '10 at 13:03
  • I am not sure if other ( non Chinese) sites will be able to use that kind of urls due to theirs parser / regexp restriction. That might affect your's site page rank in negative way. – zgorawski Oct 19 '10 at 08:01
  • This is not really programming related. – Gumbo Oct 19 '10 at 10:17
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    Related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2742852/unicode-characters-in-urls – Pekka Oct 19 '10 at 10:19
  • thanks for asking but really, this should be asked on webmasters.stackexchange.com @jpkeisala – ericn Mar 07 '13 at 08:56
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    @fuzzybee yes, sure but this question is older than webmasters.stackexchange.com – jpkeisala Mar 07 '13 at 09:07

8 Answers8

4

from a SEO perspective

GENERAL URL RULES:

  • all URLs on an a webproperty must be according to these rules (listed in priority)

1) unique (1 URL == 1 ressource)

2) permanent (they do not change)

3) manageable (1 logic per site section, no comlplicated exceptions)

4) easily scaleable logic

5) short

6) with a targeted keyword phrase

the targeted keyword phrase is the least important - but it's still important. if you can have a short, scaleable, manageable, permanent, unique URL logic - with non-english characters, then go for it.

there are benifits if the URL match the search term, as the search term gets highlighted in the SERPs, additionally the URL is the most used anchor text (as people tend to copy & paste URLs), so you get a cool anchor text if you use the keyword (in whatever language) in the URL, also the URL keyword is seen as content and adds context to the page, another SEO plus.

so yeah, go for it, but only if it does not work agains principle 1 to 5

Franz Enzenhofer
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As of June this year ICANN have approved the use of chinese characters in domains without the use of .cn at the end.

SEO Agency
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  • This still doesn't mean that using an unencoded chinese character in a URL is valid. But, good information – Pekka Oct 19 '10 at 10:18
  • @Pekka: And even if it's valid, that doesn't automatically mean it's a good idea to do so. – Stefan Steiger Oct 25 '10 at 14:18
  • @Quandary well, that's easy to say for us latin-alphabet based countries... I can understand that it's annoying not to be able to have domain names and E-Mail addresses in your native script. It's still horribly painful and expensive for us programmers who have to implement it, no doubt. – Pekka Oct 25 '10 at 14:25
  • @Pekka: I agree, though in my case, German only has the additional ÄÖÜ, which can even in ordinary German be escaped as ae oe ue, the rest is the same. It's only a nuissance if you have several of these character one after another, or if a colleague of mine uses one of them in a SQL column name, while I have to merge my scripts on the ascii-only windows command line... However, I can very well imagine that that's a little bit different for Chinese users. Still, it's not a good idea. – Stefan Steiger Oct 25 '10 at 14:42
  • @Quandary yeah. Internationalization should have been taken into account 30-40 years ago - it would have prevented the shitty duct tape fixes we have to use today ... Punycode, code pages... – Pekka Oct 25 '10 at 14:44
  • Indeed. Take a look at for example the MinGW compiler for windows. We're in 2010 and the C++ STL unicode parts are still incomplete at best. MSFT is a bit better, but not really much. – Stefan Steiger Oct 25 '10 at 17:53
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I wouldn't, for a simple reason: E-mail.

The e-mail protocol does not (yet?) include those characters. So if your domain would be www.äüö.com, you could not use the mail addresses <...>@äöü.com.

See the first comment for a work-around.

Kajetan Abt
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    Wrong. You'd need to take a browser, resolve äöü.com to the punycode url, and then replace äöü.com with xn-whatever.com. Though you are right inasfar as the average user would be too stupid for that, and MS programs such as Outlook don't yet incorporate punycode transformation for doing that automagically (Mozilla Thunderbird does, BTW). – Stefan Steiger Oct 19 '10 at 10:19
  • Maybe he did not mean the domain name, but the rest of the URL. I think it is ok if the site is made to serve chineese auditory only and will be good for the SEO. – Yasen Zhelev Oct 19 '10 at 10:33
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No it is not. First, you will have problems registering your domainname in the dns system (you have to resolve it to punycode)

Second, Googlebot and BingBot value keywords in URLs very much (PageRank), which unforunately won't be recognized if your URL is punycode/whatever encoded (well, maybe Google fixed it, but MS probably won't for another year or two).

Third, as far as pagenames are concerned, the browser will have to support these languages, which is not certain for anything that isn't english.

Stefan Steiger
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Simply no... First of all, SEO wants your url to be easily accessible, and i am not sure if people writes an url easily like: 

www.çakıöğünüveşarkı.com

So first of all, your url will be so unfirendly... This site is a simple tool for url chech for SEO...

Most web based frameworks supports slugification of your page names isto accessible urls.

So, 1- keep your urls accessible 2- define your page title and meta tags so spiders reas them properly since meta tags do not have any problem with special characters...

Mp0int
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I am not very sure about SEO. But since you have tagged it with usability, I wish to add that it won't be a very good idea. It will be next to impossible for someone with non chinese keyboard layout to type your url. Unless it is extremely important in SEO, I would advice you to stay away from it.

Joyce Babu
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    If the URL have chinese characters then I guess it is supposed to have a chinese audience with chinese keyboards – Carlos Muñoz Oct 05 '10 at 15:17
  • Maybe, but a good web developer cannot take that for granted. Especially if the page can lead to a sale. – Joyce Babu Oct 05 '10 at 15:27
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    You can take it for granted it the specification says so. If you work in websites that only makes sense locally (in non english places), then it makes perfect sense. – Carlos Muñoz Oct 05 '10 at 15:36
  • I am not ready for a fight. I just expressed my opinion. I will never do it, unless it is extremely important. Your site, your rule. My site, my rule :) – Joyce Babu Oct 05 '10 at 15:38
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If most of the users are Chinese who search in native language the answer is YES

Xaqron
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URLs cannot contain non-ASCII characters. But it is possible to encode non-ASCII characters in ASCII.

In the domain name part, you can use IDN. I don't know how well-supported that is, but it's there.

In the path prt, you can use the % escape notation on unicode codepoints. This is well-supported by current browsers, and understood by search engines - so it is indeed good SEO. We're using it for European accented characters, and it all works fine.

Tom Anderson
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