Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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.

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?

We have been tracking Google and Bing shopping visits by appending some tracking code like this '?utm_source=google&utm_medium=shopping ' at the end of all the URLs we send with our feeds. If you track like this you can segment traffic from each medium (i.e., organic, shopping, cpc).

Thanks Korgo, that is good to know. The question still remains though: If both versions of the page have the same URL and canonical tag, is it cloaking?

We are developing our mobile site right now and we are using a user agent sniffer to figure out what kind of device the visitor is using. Once the server knows whether it is a desktop or mobile browser it will deliver the appropriate template. We decided to use the same URL for both versions of the page rather than using m.websiteurl.com or www.websiteurl.mobi so that traffic to either version of these pages would register as a visit to the page.

Will search engines consider this cloaking or is mobile "versioning" an acceptable practice? The pages in essence are the same, the mobile version will just leave out extraneous scripts and unnecessary resources to better display on a mobile device.

I considered this but our shopping cart software is has a lot of "black box" features including this one, so I have no control over how this feature is handled. Also, we use SLI search with site champion, which does a very similar auto-generated landing page function for category facets so including this function again would be redundant and possibly dilute our indexed results.

My site has faceted navigation that allows shoppers to filter category page results by things brand, size, price range, etc.  These pages 302 redirect to the same page they came from, which already include canonical meta tags.  I added the rel="nofollow" attribute to the facet links and added the line "Disallow: /category_filter/" to robots.txt.

One of our SEO consultants told me that this is likely diluting the potency of the page's link juice since they are divided among all the page's links, including the links I am instructing crawlers to disregard.

Can anybody tell me whether I am following the best practices for links that redirect to the same page?

HTML5 is supposed to revolutionize the way browsers, web clients and services are supposed to "understand" information on the web. I have been planning on converting my site to HTML5 ever since it went into a working draft last spring, however I wanted to know if upgrading to HTML5 would offer any SEO benefits or if it would actually have a negative effect on how my site is perceived on the web.

I guess my real question here is "Do search engines recognize HTML5 sectioning?"

Is content found in semantic sections like

<header>,

<footer>,

<nav>,

<aside>, treated any different than content inside generic HTML4 containers like,

or ?

</aside>

</nav>

</footer>

</header>