Do Letters With Accents Affect SEO?
-
Hi Guys,
My company has a franchise of a foreign company that uses an accent/foreign letter in its brand name. We have to refer to this franchise with this symbol on our website to meet their standards.
I've done some research on this but its not conclusive, so i was wondering whether anyone here can confirm this for me;
Will using the letter with this symbol impair our rankings for this franchise name? Obviously as a UK business people search for this franchise with a regular letter and not the accented one. I would have thought that Google is clever enough to recognise the meaning of the accented letter by now and therefore it wouldn't affect rankings (much). Furthermore, do you think that it would make any difference to use the HTML element to represent the accent rather than copy and pasting the symbol onto our website? I would've thought this would help Google pick it up, but it might not make a difference anyway!
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks
Sam
-
Hi Dirk,
perfect, thanks a lot for clarifying.
All the best.
Sam
-
Hi Sam,
To clarify - for me the correct spelling is the spelling using the accents. For the foreign characters I meant to encode them. In the example above: not use référencement in the HTML but rather référencement
rgds
Dirk
-
That was a helpful post - thanks for helping out.
Sam
-
Thanks a lot for your response here, Dirk.
Just to clarify - when you state to use the **correct **spelling on the page, am i correct in assuming you are meaning the spelling with the accent?
and with the foreign characters in HTML, by this are you meaning to use the proper HTML elements in every case rather than copy and pasting symbols in?
Apologies for asking these simple questions, but just wanted to make sure.
Kind Regards
Sam
-
Hi there,
thanks a lot for your response!
The franchise is a brand name, one that we look after but it is not anywhere in our own brand name. So if you think of a PC shop that sells Apple products, the brand name is Apple but the shop itself has nothing to do with apple and just sells their products - this is the case for us. Would this change your opinion on how to deal with it?
Thanks
Sam
-
The franchise name is a brand name i presume. In that case is does not make any SEO difference. You will rank for your brandname anyway. Choose the most correct version and just run with it. The authority is going to be there!
If the franchise name is something like carinsurance.nl.. THEN you have an interresting case.
In the dutch language the word:
"jaloezieën" is the correct way of writing. In google everyone uses "jaloezieen". The results on the google page are different. Based on my research the main difference is due to the incomming links beeing spelled in the correct and the incorrect way.
-
Just to add to the answer of Luis - in most cases Google is quite capable of guessing the intention of the searcher.
Even in countries that traditionally have a lot of accents, a lot of people are searching for the words without the accents. This is probably partially due to the fact that on mobile it's not always easy to get the accents right, but also due to laziness (it's generally faster to just type the word without the accents).
If you search on google.fr for référencement (correct spelling) or referencement - the results are identical. All the results however use the correct spelling in the meta description & title.(if you check Google trends for this keyword you'll notice that the wrong spelling is even slightly more popular than the correct version)
If you take the example given in the question Luis is referencing - the results for Google.es for cursos de inglés & cursos de ingles are now identical as wellSo my advice would be to use the correct spelling on your page - Google should normally be able to figure it out.
Just make sure that you escape the foreign characters in your HTML.rgds,
Dirk
-
Hello Sam,
I was about to answer you but I found a similar question in Moz some years ago. Please, take a look: http://moz.com/community/q/google-and-keywords-with-and-without-accents-how-to-approach-optimization-for-both
Hope this helps and clarify things to you!
Luis
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
-
Are there any SEO issues we should be aware of on Gutenberg?
We are launching a new website and switching to WP 5.0 Gutenberg. Are there any issues we should be aware of related to SEO with the new platform?
Technical SEO | | AegisLiving0 -
Is Removing Breadcrumbs Detrimental for SEO?
We have full navigational breadcrumbs on our site for the menu and the brand menu. i.e. Home > Clothing > Jackets Brand > Brand Name > Brand Jackets There's been talk of removing this and having it like Chico's does, where on item pages they just have a link at the top to previous category (i.e. you're on a shirt product page and at the top it says "Back to Tops" instead of listing Home > Clothing > Tops) Is doing something like this detrimental to SEO? From what I've read Breadcrumbs are for user experience but I just want to be sure.
Technical SEO | | AliMac260 -
CSS background image links bad for seo?
On one of the websites I manage SEO for, the developers are changing how our graphical links are coded. They're basically coding in such away where there is no anchor text and no alt tag, so for example: So there's no anchor nor alt context for Google's crawler. How badly will this affect SEO, or is it extremely minimal and I shouldn't worry about? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | JimLynch0 -
Mutiple domains with similar SEO
ok we have one main domain about our company which is about renting luxury and exotic cars. (PrestigeLuxuryRentals.com). We own other domains with similar keywords,meta,etc on the URL and SEO For example, we own domains like exoticcarrentalorlando/exoticcarrentaltampa, with same background and design as main site but, we have different content than main site to avoid duplicate. Keep in mind, all the other domain we own, all have same template with our companies name on it but, it doesnt have any content or link that pertains to main site. is this a problem?
Technical SEO | | prestigeluxuryrentals.com0 -
Does server location affect rankings?
Hey guys, I'm just wondering whether you can help me out here. We're considering moving our servers to a new country but are a little hesitant to what - if any - SEO impact it would have on our clients' sites. For instance, if all of our clients are UK-based but their server isn't, would that affect their rank in Google UK? Or is it simply just a case of whether moving a server would affect the site speed or not?
Technical SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Questionable SEO
Chess Telecom appears first when you search for 'business phone lines' in the UK so I used a campaign to check them out. It seems they've got tons of unrelated links and using comment spamming to increase their ranking. Along with fake twitter accounts and other things. Search for 'jewel jubic chess' and you'll see what i mean. I assumed this wasnt a good idea and been trying to get my link on relevant websites only. Any comments or suggestions? Should I simply trust that google will hopefully punish them eventually? Or should I be fighting fire with fire? Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | DanFromUK0 -
The best way to organize a gallery for SEO?
I need to redo the following gallery
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept
http://goo.gl/PFvjE
because besides the fact that it looks ugly, it's an SEO mess. Since all the pages are comprised of images, and the only text is the navigation, I'm getting duplicate content issues. I tried adding a little paragraph of text on some of the pages, but this thing needs a total revamp. My main question is this: is that menu being repeated on all the pages really a good thing? What good is it to, say, on the fire patches page, to have a menu that includes all these keywords for sports patches? Would it be better to just have a main gallery page that lists the main patch types: applique, motorcycle, Scouting, ect, and then once you get to that page, list all the different sub categories?0