When it comes to international SEO (especially within EU) there are many questions and myths. One of the myths I have heard most often is that you shouldn’t use Special characters in domain names or URLs, since the search engines can’t understand them. This is however of cause a false statement. Before I get ahead of myself let me just try to explain a few words that I will be using later on in this article. But before that a disclaimer I’m Danish hence my English might not be up to par with you people who are native to English. So be a pal, and ignore any punctuation and spelling errors. I promise I’ll try to keep them to a minimum.
Language Specific Characters
I’ll be calling them LSCs from now on. Special characters used in other languages than English, like: Æ, Ü and φ.
Internationalized domain name or IDN: This is a domain name that contains LSC, such as ” “übercool.
Punycode: A way to translate special Singapore Business Fax Lis characters into ASCII code (‘normal’ characters) that the web servers actually understand for instance in the above example with in punycode this will look like: “xn--bercool-Old versions of Firefox actually encoded the URL in the navigation bar to punycode, making IDNs look strange and dangerous. Luckily they don’t do that anymore.
ASCII code: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Well it’s basically English letters, no reason to make it more complex than that.
IDN support in e-mail Clients, Browsers:
When working with online marketing in Europe, it’s important to understand how email clients, browsers and the search engines handle these LSCs. So let’s jump right in there and get started.
In the past IDN support in email clients Dd Leads and browsers was a huge problem and back in the days of Internet Explorer 6 people would have to download a plug-in from windows update to get IDN support.
In Europe the problem is almost non-existent. Especially in Scandinavia, where we are model.