Hi Tom,

I really appreciate your detailed answer.

You give a lot of information here. Thanks.

Taking into account the 3 main points you mention I would go with the Greeklish.

I think I should provide explanations about the term Greeklish. The official language of Greece is modern Greek. Modern Greek has a specific alphabet and it is not the same as the latin alphabet. On the other hand when a Greek person write Greek words by using the latin alphabet, then that is called Greeklish (Greek + english). It is a quick and easy way to write mms, imessages without paying attention on the orthography.

A URL in Greeklish is understandable by people in Greece => it can be considered as localised URL

A URL in Greeklish can easily be shared with no particular technical implications.

On the other hand the wikipedia articles use the encoded Greek Characters in the URL.

Well, I think if the SEO benefit is not that big, I would go with the Greeklish solutions.

I would be glad to have the feedback of other experts about that subject.

Tom thank you very much!

Regards,

Lenia

Hello all,

I am Greek and I have a quite strange question for you.

Greek characters are generally recognized as special characters and need to have UTF-8 encoding.

The question is about the URLs of Greek websites.

According the advice of Google webmasters blog we should never put the raw greek characters into the URL of a link. We always should use the encoded version if we decide to have Greek characters and encode them or just use  latin characters in the URL. Having Greek characters un-encoded could likely cause technical difficulties with some services, e.g. search engines or other url-processing web pages.

To give you an example let's look at

A) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1which is the URL with the encoded Greek characters and it shows up in the browser asB) http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ελβετία

The problem with A is that everytime we need to copy the URL and paste it somewhere (in an email, in a social bookmark site, social media site etc) the URL appears like the A, plenty of strange characters and %. This link sometimes may cause broken link issues especially when we try to submit it in social networks and social bookmarks.

On the other hand, googlebot reads that url but I am wondering if there is an advantage for the websites who keep the encoded URLs or not (in compairison to the sites who use Greeklish in the URLs)!

So the question is:

For the SEO issues, is it better to use Greek characters (encoded like this one  http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%95%CE%BB%CE%B2%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%AF%CE%B1) in the URLs or would it be better to use just Greeklish (for example http://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvetia ?

Thank you very much for your help!

Regards,

Lenia