Non-Unicode Fonts and SEO
-
For some reason we've translated part of our website into Burmese. The most common font in use in Myanmar (Burma) is called Zawgyi and is non-unicode. Which means that if you look at it in Chrome you get a bunch of squares. That's not a problem because firefox provides support and 9x% of Burmese use firefox.
So two questions
- Will we get penalised for using non-unicode font?
- Can google understand the pages and will we rank?
It's worth mentioning that this is 0.001% or less of our traffic and an experiment (and market research) to find out a bit about that market than having much real BL impact
-
I would suggest using the Padauk font from SIL instead. This uses the Unicode standard and you should be able to use CSS font embedding to maximise the support for other browsers.
Google should be able to understand the content as long as it is encoded in a standard character set (UTF-8, for example). Even though Zawgyi is not compliant with the Unicode standard your pages should be being served with the UTF-8 character encoding so Google should be able to index the content. I don't think Google pays any attention to the font in use by the design but it is an interesting point which I haven't particularly considered before and which I had to think about carefully before posting this response.
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 to Localise per Region (Europe, America, APAC, EMEI) and not per country as best SEO practise?
Hi SEO expertises! I am currently working with a client that initially have an English website targeting UK users but want to expand their market into four new regions (Europe, America, APAC and EMEI) keeping English as a main language. I would like to request your help here as I told the client ISO location and hreflang it will be just possible per language and they must need to localise each English region with local keywords, however I would like to double check if it will be any way (Sitemap, Hreflang) we can tell Google we are targeting per region and not per country? Thanks a lot!
International SEO | | Atalig20 -
International SEO
Okay, so I have read through the following link in respect to International SEO (https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo), and I believe that the way forward it a ccTLD. My thought was to have .com, .co.uk and .eu. Currently my site is .com, but receives most of its traffic from UK sources. I'm concerned that when I switch over to ccTLDs, the .co.uk in particular, that my UK traffic could dry up. Switching from .com to .co.uk and then using the .com to target the US market makes sense, but I would like to know others opinions on the potential dangers of doing this. Also, are ccTLDs kept on the same hosting or would they require individual hosting? The link doesn't cover this question.
International SEO | | moon-boots1 -
What strategy is better for a multilingual site for the SEO point of view?
Hi everyone, in a case for a site with two languages like spanish and english, how would do you deal with it? I can see 4 cases, which is better?? 1. With differents domains: mydomain.es (for spanish version) and mydomain.com (for english version). 2. With subfolder mydomain.com/es/ and mydomain.com/en/ 3. With Subdomain: es.mydomain.com and en.mydomain.com 4 With URL translation (any url is translated in ther languages but not use of subdomain or subfolder): mydominain.com/hola and mydomiain.com/hello Thanks very much for your answers (i love this forum). 🙂
International SEO | | webtematica0 -
International SEO Query
Hi All, I have an international SEO question and was wondering if you could help. My client runs a website in the UK (www.example.co.uk). The site is ranked well for it's collection of keywords, my client now wishes to target the US market. He wishes to use the same web structure and design in new site www.example.com as we know this converts well. My questions are: What would be the best practice for setting this up? I know there will be duplicate content issues if a website is duplicated. If we use the same design and website structure but re-word content, would this be acceptable? Thank you for all your help in advance.
International SEO | | SO_UK0 -
International SEO Question: Using hreflang tags across two different TLDs.
Hi! My UK based company just recently made the decision to let the US market operate their ecommerce business independently. Initially, both markets were operating off the same domain using sub-directories (i.e: www.brandname.com/en-us/ , www.brandname.com/en-gb/ ) Now that the US team have broken away from the domain - they are now using www.brandnameUSA.com while the UK continues to use www.brandname.com/en-gb/. The content is similar across both domains - however, the new US website has been able to consolidate several product variations onto single product pages where the UK website is using individual product pages for each variation. We have placed a geo-filter on the main domain which is 301 redirecting North American traffic looking for www.brandname.com to www.brandnameUSA.com However, since the domain change has taken place, product pages from the original domain are now indexing alongside the new US websites product pages in US search results. The UK website wants to be the default destination for all international traffic. My question is - how do we correctly setup hrlang tags across two separate TLDs and how do we handle a situation where multiple product pages on the "default" domain have been consolidated into one product page on the new USA domain? This is how we are currently handling it: "en-us" href="https://www.BRANDNAMEUSA.com/All-Variations" /> href="https://www.BRANDNAMEUSA.com/All-Variations" />
International SEO | | alexcbrands0 -
Country-specific SEO
Hi, my client offers courses that whilst based in Manchester, England are mainly attended by people in countries such as Georgia, Libya and Nigeria etc. The people that attend the courses are fluent in English. We're looking at performing country-specific SEO and I have a few queries. The plan so far: Obtain TLD's in each target country. These TLD's would be hosted on the same server as the core site based in England. Option 1: Each TLD would be a microsite with content specific to the country including geo-signals, in English. Option 2: Each TLD would 301 redirect to the core site, i.e. example.sa redirects to example.com/sa/ and this country-specific section would have relevant geo-signals. So I have 3 questions at this point: 1. Most-all of the tips I have seen about country-specific SEO assume that the content should be translated to the native tongue although in this case, the audience are fluent English speaks. Does this make a difference? Is it okay to use English and still be able to rank in country-specific search engines? 2. Between options 1 & option 2 - which would be the optimum setup? 3. Last question, if we obtain the TLD's I hear that it's not necessary to also host that TLD in the target country, is this right? Thanks.
International SEO | | lokito0 -
Looking for content writers for multi-language SEO
Hi All, I'm currently doing a lot of work for a UK client who has multiple sites outside the UK (all part of the same business). We're currently discussing the option of us handling all of his SEO for his German, French, Spanish and Italian sites too, but we only have access to one person in the office who can speak French and Spanish. They're currently booked up on other jobs that we can't really move them off, so I'm looking for options of outsourcing some of the content writing. My question is, does anyone know of any high quality content writing services that have writers available to write for the countries languages above? We're going to focus initially on their on-site strategy and building up their high quality content. At the moment, they don't have much relevant content on their website, so we're going to initially look at this. Moving forward, we'll be looking at their off-site strategy and trying to find areas to submit high quality articles, look at guest blogging and PR opportunities. Any tips anyone has on this side (in terms of outsourcing to native speakers) would be quite useful too! Many thanks,
International SEO | | PinpointDesigns
Lewis0 -
The case of the attempted server hacking and it's effect on SEO
Since relaunch earlier this year, we've had patches where our site has failed to load. It's happened every so often, but, until I receive the server logs from the company who hosts the site, I won't know exactly when this issue has occurred. Until now, we've only noticed it when someone in the company has tried, and failed, to access the site. Again, it happened today. After hassling our developers/hosting firm for a conclusive answer as to why, it emerged that their server (perhaps our site in particular because of the nature of our business) had been the target of an attempted hacking. We've now concluded that every time our site has messed around like this, it's because of a possible hack. Would anyone in SEOmoz Land be able to tell me if this is going to have a negative impact for our SEO and site performance? Would search engines be able to tell if a potential hack is, or was, occurring? Would we then be penalised? Please feel free to elaborate on the hacking process in general, too, if you can because this is the first time I've encountered it. Thanks
International SEO | | Martin_S0