Represent non-ASCII characters in URLS gives better page rank in search engines?

Question

Most part of the world uses non-ASCII characters. But some idioms use things like é, ö, á, ã, õ etc, which can be "converted" to ascii.

Suppose the title of the post is:

Configuração é fácil!

How to represent that in a URL?

www.myblog.com/post/1200/Configura__o-_-f_cil

A much better representantion is

www.myblog.com/post/1200/Configuracao-e-facil

Will this improve page rank in search engines?

How to do that in your favorite language?

Check related articles: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/331279/how-to-change-diacritic-characters-to-non-diacritic-ones](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/331279/how-to-change-diacritic-characters-to-non-diacritic-ones) [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/285228/how-to-convert-utf-8-to-us-ascii-in-java/285890#285890](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/285228/how-to-convert-utf-8-to-us-ascii-in-java/285890#285890) — LicenseQ, Feb 18 '09 at 15:20
So what are you going to do about Chinese characters? Or Japanese kana? Or the German scharfes S (ß)? I think you need to think about these things before implementing this feature. — Tamas Czinege, Feb 18 '09 at 14:36
Maybe one can just ignore a non ascii convertable character. — motobói, Feb 18 '09 at 14:39
'Scharfes S' (ß) is generally decomposed into two s's: Straße => Strasse — Markus Schnell, Feb 18 '09 at 14:53
The problem with transliteration is that you might loose or change the meaning of the words. Take for example the german words *Buße* (engl. *penance*) and *Busse* (engl. *busses*) or *Maße* (engl. *measures*, *dimensions*) and *Masse* (engl. *mass*). — Gumbo, Feb 18 '09 at 15:22

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 18 '09 at 14:31

1

In Perl

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use utf8;
use Text::Unidecode;
print unidecode(
    "áéíóú\n"
);

# That prints: aeiou

answered Feb 18 '09 at 14:31

motobói