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
-
How old is 404 data from Google Search Console?
I was wondering how old the 404 data from Google Search Console actually is? Does anyone know over what kind of timespan their site 404s data is compiled over? How long do the 404s tend to take to disappear from the Google Search Console, once they are fixed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Paragraphs/Tables for Content & SEO
Hi Does anyone know if Google prefers paragraphs over content in a table, or doesn't it make much difference?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Javascript onclick redirects / porn sites...
We noticed around 7 websites which with domains that were just recently registered (with privacy protection). They are using our website keywords/titles and brand name and the sites are mostly porn / junk sites. They don't link to our website directly but use a javascript onclick redirect which is why we think we aren't seeing them in our backlinks report. We've been in business for over 12 years and haven't come across sites like this before. We recently lost our first page rankings for a few of our highest converting key phrases and have been digging in to possible causes. Just wondering if these sites could be impacting our results, and how to figure out if there are more like this? Examples: nesat.net
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary
flowmeterdirectory.biz
finnsat.net
dotsjobs.net0 -
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 -
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 -
Finding broken links / resources by topic
Hi fellow mozzers! In an effort to ensure we're exploring every avenue when launching our new website, I was hoping to find some useful broken links / resources that we could incorporate into our link building. We have used the standard tools for this (W3C, Xenu etc), but they all seem to have the same issue in that they reveal all the missing links on a site (although some don't actually tell you the page they are on), but you still have to sort them to see if the links/ resource is related to your theme. When you're on a niche site, this obviously isn't an issue, but on a site like Mashable (to use the example given in a recent SEOmoz blog) it could result in wading through hundreds of links to find one relevant one right at the end. Is there a tool that allows you to specify what theme links you are looking for from a site, or better yet one that allows you to check multiple sites for multiple missing themed links in one go? Or is the best way to export the list and just search the document for certain keywords?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | themegroup0 -
Posing QU's on Google Variables "aclk", "gclid" "cd", "/aclk" "/search", "/url" etc
I've been doing a bit of stats research prompted by read the recent ranking blog http://www.seomoz.org/blog/gettings-rankings-into-ga-using-custom-variables There are a few things that have come up in my research that I'd like to clear up. The below analysis has been done on my "conversions". 1/. What does "/aclk" mean in the Referrer URL? I have noticed a strong correlation between this and "gclid" in the landing page variable. Does it mean "ad click" ?? Although they seem to "closely" correlate they don't exactly, so when I have /aclk in the referrer Url MOSTLY I have gclid in the landing page URL. BUT not always, and the same applies vice versa. It's pretty vital that I know what is the best way to monitor adwords PPC, so what is the best variable to go on? - Currently I am using "gclid", but I have about 25% extra referral URL's with /aclk in that dont have "gclid" in - so am I underestimating my number of PPC conversions? 2/. The use of the variable "cd" is great, but it is not always present. I have noticed that 99% of my google "Referrer URL's" either start with:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | James77
/aclk - No cd value
/search - No cd value
/url - Always contains the cd variable. What do I make of this?? Thanks for the help in advance!0 -
Is linking to search results bad for SEO?
If we have pages on our site that link to search results is that a bad thing? Should we set the links to "nofollow"?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0