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
-
Suddenly keywords Disappeared from Google Search Results
Hello Guys Please help me, suddenly all of my site's keywords are disappeared from google search result, most of keywords are no.1 on google but today after 6pm i see the traffic decreasing and when i search my keywords there is no any keywords in search result. Only homepage keyword is showing. Please Help what is Happening with me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mianazeem4180 -
How to get local search volumes?
Hi Guys, I want to get search volumes for "carpet cleaning" for certain areas in Sydney, Australia. I'm using this process: Choose to ‘Search for new keyword and ad group ideas’. Enter the main keywords regarding your product / service Remove any default country targeting Specify your chosen location (s) by targeting specific cities / regions Click to ‘Get ideas’ The problem is none of the areas, even popular ones (like north sydney, surry hills, newtown, manly) are appearing and Google keyword tool, no matches. Is there any other tools or sources of data i can use to get accurate search volumes for these areas? Any recommendations would be very much appreciated. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak650 -
Bulk reverse image search?
Hi, i have a couple fashion clients who have very active blogs and post lots of fashion content and images. Like 50+ images weekly. I want to check if these images have been used by other sources in bulk, are there any good reverse image search tools which can do this? Or any recommended ways to efficiently do this for a large number of images? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | snj_cerkez0 -
Crawled page count in Search console
Hi Guys, I'm working on a project (premium-hookahs.nl) where I stumble upon a situation I can’t address. Attached is a screenshot of the crawled pages in Search Console. History: Doing to technical difficulties this webshop didn’t always no index filterpages resulting in thousands of duplicated pages. In reality this webshops has less than 1000 individual pages. At this point we took the following steps to result this: Noindex filterpages. Exclude those filterspages in Search Console and robots.txt. Canonical the filterpages to the relevant categoriepages. This however didn’t result in Google crawling less pages. Although the implementation wasn’t always sound (technical problems during updates) I’m sure this setup has been the same for the last two weeks. Personally I expected a drop of crawled pages but they are still sky high. Can’t imagine Google visits this site 40 times a day. To complicate the situation: We’re running an experiment to gain positions on around 250 long term searches. A few filters will be indexed (size, color, number of hoses and flavors) and three of them can be combined. This results in around 250 extra pages. Meta titles, descriptions, h1 and texts are unique as well. Questions: - Excluding in robots.txt should result in Google not crawling those pages right? - Is this number of crawled pages normal for a website with around 1000 unique pages? - What am I missing? BxlESTT
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bob_van_Biezen0 -
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 -
Citation/Business Directory Question...
A company I work for has two numbers... one for the std call centre and one for tracking SEO. Now, if local citation/business directory listings have the same address but different numbers, will this affect local/other SEO results? Any help is greatly appreciated! 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geniusenergyltd0 -
Soft Hyphenation: Influence on Search Engines
Does anyone have experience on soft hyphenation and its effects on rankings? We are planning to use in our company blog to improve the layout. Currently, every word above 4 syllable will be soft hyphenated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zeepartner
This seems to render okay in all browsers, but it might be a problem with IE9... In HTML 5, the "" soft hyphenation seems to be replaced with the <wbr> Tag (http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_wbr.asp) and i don't find anything else about soft-hyphenation in the specs. Any experiences or opinions about this? Do you think it affects rankings if there are a lot of soft hyphens in the text? Does it still make sense to use or would you switch to <wbr> already?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