URLs contains other language than English

[Mustansar]

I am in need of your advice in regards to urls of my new sites. I have got one site from gulf region site is in English and Arabic language. The issue is we are getting url from both. Some are Arabic, do you guys think it will effect the ranking result?

url example is : www.mydomain.com/بيع-بي-سيارة

[TomRayner]

Hey there

To Quote Google on this, with the issue of ASCII and UTF encoded characters, like Arabic:

"Yes, we can generally keep up with UTF-8 encoded URLs and we’ll generally show them to users in our search results (but link to your server with the URLs properly escaped). I would recommend that you also use escaped URLs in your links, to make sure that your site is compatible with older browsers that don’t understand straight UTF-8 URLs"

So their recommendation would be to have both URLs available (the English and the Arabic) in order to support all users.  So the fact you already do this is a good thing.

The next step would be to make sure you are handling duplicate content correctly.  If the Arabic and non Arabic URLs are linking to a page with the same content - Google _should_be able to recognise this as the same page and not penalise you for duplications.  So if the Arabic URL and the "escaped URL" (ASCII/English equivalent) both go to the same page, you should be fine.  I've experienced this quite a few times with Turkish websites, for example, that also have UTF encoded characters.

However, you can eliminate the risk further by adding a canonical tag to each page.  As far as I am aware, the canonical tag will support Arabic characters and so, on each page of the site, add a canonical tag that points to that page.  For example, with the URL above, you would want to place a canonical tag like:

You can read more on canonical tags here: http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

Do be aware that for XML sitemaps, the URLs in the sitemap need to be URL-escaped - that is to say, UTF encoded URLs need to be made into their ASCII equivalent.  You can read more about that in this Google guide to using non-alphanumeric characters in Sitemap URLs.

Hope this helps.