Special Characters in URL & Google Search Engine (Index & Crawl)

[LabeliumUSA]

G'd everyone,

I need help with understanding how special characters impact SEO.  Eg. é , ë ô in words

Does anyone have good insights or reference material regarding the treatment of Special Characters by Google Search Engine?

• how Page Title / Meta Desc with Special Chars are being index  & Crawl

• Best Practices when it comes to URLs -

• uses of Unicode, HTML entity references - when are where?

• any disadvantage using special characters

• Does special characters in URL have any impact on SEO performance & User search, experience.

Thanks heaps,

Amy

[JaneCopland]

Google handles special characters in URLs, titles, etc. just fine now - a page like http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Château_de_Versailles uses the proper accent on the a, and is displayed properly in modern browsers as well as in Google's results.

There should be no impact on rankings, although it's safe to say that best practice would include using the proper characters, as they certainly benefit usability.