URLs in Greek, Greeklish or English? What is the best way to get great ranking?
-
Hello all,
I am Greek and I have a quite strange question for you.
Greek characters are generally recognized as special characters and need to have UTF-8 encoding.
The question is about the URLs of Greek websites.
According the advice of Google webmasters blog we should never put the raw greek characters into the URL of a link. We always should use the encoded version if we decide to have Greek characters and encode them or just use latin characters in the URL. Having Greek characters un-encoded could likely cause technical difficulties with some services, e.g. search engines or other url-processing web pages.
To give you an example let's look at
A) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1which is the URL with the encoded Greek characters and it shows up in the browser asB) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ελβετία
The problem with A is that everytime we need to copy the URL and paste it somewhere (in an email, in a social bookmark site, social media site etc) the URL appears like the A, plenty of strange characters and %. This link sometimes may cause broken link issues especially when we try to submit it in social networks and social bookmarks.
On the other hand, googlebot reads that url but I am wondering if there is an advantage for the websites who keep the encoded URLs or not (in compairison to the sites who use Greeklish in the URLs)!
So the question is:
For the SEO issues, is it better to use Greek characters (encoded like this one http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1) in the URLs or would it be better to use just Greeklish (for example http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvetia ?
Thank you very much for your help!
Regards,
Lenia
-
Hi Tom,
I really appreciate your detailed answer.
You give a lot of information here. Thanks.
Taking into account the 3 main points you mention I would go with the Greeklish.
I think I should provide explanations about the term Greeklish. The official language of Greece is modern Greek. Modern Greek has a specific alphabet and it is not the same as the latin alphabet. On the other hand when a Greek person write Greek words by using the latin alphabet, then that is called Greeklish (Greek + english). It is a quick and easy way to write mms, imessages without paying attention on the orthography.
A URL in Greeklish is understandable by people in Greece => it can be considered as localised URL
A URL in Greeklish can easily be shared with no particular technical implications.
On the other hand the wikipedia articles use the encoded Greek Characters in the URL.
Well, I think if the SEO benefit is not that big, I would go with the Greeklish solutions.
I would be glad to have the feedback of other experts about that subject.
Tom thank you very much!
Regards,
Lenia
-
This is a really good question, Lenia. Really, really good, in fact.
Let's break this down into a number of factors:
Having localised URLs (by that I mean URLs, written in the country's language) - From an SEO perspective, I do believe there is some correlation that having localised URLs helps to rank higher, in the same way that having a keyword in the URL may help - having this keyword in the country's language would, by default, work the same way. However, the SEO benefit of doing so isn't that big, I'd see it as only a little boost, so I wouldn't let the SEO side weigh too heavily on your decision.
Now, having localised URLs for a user perspective is something that I think is very useful. I'd see it as a bigger plus for a user than I would for SEO purposes. I think having localised URLs shows the user that you're a part of that country, not just a larger corporation with an international presence but no real interest in the country for example. I think it helps users recognise and anticipate what the URLs would be for their user journey as well. Also, (I don't know how relative this might be for you) but having localised URLs can definitely help for offline campaigns and promotion. Say you were running some newspaper or billboard ads and you wanted to track how many people were then visiting your site as a result, you might want to setup a custom URL or search term for the campaign. So, you're newspaper advert would have "Visit www.domain.com/customURLhere/" on it. This would look infinitely better if it was written in the localised language (although I suppose you could always setup a 301 redirect for the URL).
Ultimately, however, I think you're decision should largely be influenced on the technical implications. The SEO value would be slight, but not that significant whichever method you choose. I would go with whatever solution would be easiest for you technically - it sounds like it would be easier to accommodate user and SEO factors, rather than having to accommodate technical factors for a slight SEO gain.
Just my input on the issue, and so I'd love to hear more from others on it - as I think it's a great question which could do with the input of some of the talented folk here.
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
-
Ranking a Polish website in English with existing keywords
I have a website that is currently in Polish and I'm interested in ranking it for the same keywords in English. I'm wondering if I need to create entirely new pages for the English version or if there are plugins or other tools that can help me translate and optimize my existing content for English search engines. my website seo factor. Any recommendations or experiences are greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mohammadrehanseo0 -
I'm struggling to understand (and fix) why I'm getting a 404 error. The URL includes this "%5Bnull%20id=43484%5D" but I cannot find that anywhere in the referring URL. Does anyone know why please? Thanks
Can you help with how to fix this 404 error please? It appears that I have a redirect from one page to the other, although the referring page URL works, but it appears to be linking to another URL with this code at the end of the the URL - %5Bnull%20id=43484%5D that I'm struggling to find and fix. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Nichole.wynter20200 -
Changing all urls
A client of mine has a wordpress website that is installed in a directory, called "site". So when you go to www.domain.com you are redirected to www.domain.com/site. We all know how bad it is to have a redirect fron your subdomain to another page. In this case I measured a loss of 5 points of page authority. The question is: what is the best practice to remove the "site" from the address and changing all the urls? Should I use the webmaster tool to tell to Google that the site is moving? It's not 100% true, cause the site is just moving one level up. Should I install a copy of the website under www.domain.com and just redirect 301 every old page to its new url? This way I think the site would be deindexet for 2/3 months. Any suggestions or tips welcome! Thanks DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Formatting dynamic urls?
We have a long-time previously well-established website that was hit by panda. On one section of the site, we have dynamic urls that include %20 in them (e.g. North%20America). It's recently come to our attention that google has both a version of the url with a plus sign (+) and the version with the %20 (space) (e.g. North+America). Upon researching this, it seems that a hyphen (-) is preferable to either of the above. We obviously need to remove the %20's from the urls as they can cause issues. So, should we stick with the + sign since it's already indexed and ranking or do a 301 rewrite and change them all to hyphens instead of the plus sign? This is the one section of the site that has maintained rankings through the panda debacle, so we need to take that into consideration as we don’t want to lose the rankings that we have. Along the same lines, we have two other sections of the site that provide search results as well, though these are all formatted to use a plus sign. Is it advisable to do a 301 rewrite to change the plus signs to hyphens on these as well or just leave them alone? This particular section has lost rankings over the last year with panda updates.
Technical SEO | | Odjobob0 -
Best way to do a site in various regions
I have a client who has 2 primary services in 4 regions He does mold removal and water damage repair. He then serves cincinnati, dayton, columbus, and indianapolis. Before hiring my company he had like 30 domains (keyword based) and had tons and tons of fake google places listings. He actually got a lot of traffic that way. However I will not tolerate that kind of stuff and want to do things the right way. First of all what is the best site approach for this. He wants a site for each service and for each city. indy mold cincy mold dayton mold dayton water etc etc etc In the end he will have 8 sites and wants to expand into other services and regions. I feel like this is not the right way to handle this as he also has another site that is more generic To me the best way to do this is a generic domain with a locations page and a page for each city. The for the Places he would get one account - an address that is hidden since he goes to customer locations, and just multiple city defined regions. He does have an office like address at each city. So should I make him a Places listing for each city or just the one? And of course how should the actual sites be organized? Thanks
Technical SEO | | webfeatseo0 -
Which is best of narrow by search URLs? Canonical or NOINDEX
I have set canonical to all narrow by search URLs. I think, it's not working well. You can get more idea by following URLs. http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?material_search=1328 http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps?finish_search=146 These kind of page have canonical tag which is pointing to following one. http://www.vistastores.com/table-lamps Because, it's actual page which I want to out rank. But, all narrow by search URLs have very different products compare to base URLs. So, How can we say it duplicate one? Which is best solution for it. Canonical or NOINDEX it by Robots?
Technical SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
URL Rewrite
We are trying to convince a client to do a massive rewrite from all URL's looking like this: "www.company.com/category/categoryId=82374" to something like "www.company.com/womens/jackets/rain" How would you describe the importance and impact of doing URL rewrites to an ecommerce site? What evidence/research can we share with them to convince them it is worth the time and effort to do?
Technical SEO | | Hakkasan0 -
What is consider best practice today for blocking admins from potentially getting indexed
What is consider best practice today for blocking pages, for instance xyz.com/admin pages, from getting indexed by the search engines or easily found. Do you recommend to still disallow it in the robots.txt file or is the robots.txt not the best place to notate your /admin location because of hackers and such? Is it better to hide the /admin with an obscure name, use the noidex tag on the page and don't list in the robots.txt file?
Technical SEO | | david-2179970