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