Eastern character set workaround for search engines

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Eastern character set workaround for search engines

ALarson

5:47 pm on Nov 30, 2006 (gmt 0)

I have a client expanding into the Japanese market whose database backend doesn't have support for Eastern character sets. The workaround has been to convert those characters into Unicode, so the HTML coding for the Japanese text looks something like this:
地理分散開発と要 .

My question is, do search engines pick this up as ascii characters and therefore wouldn't produce results if someone used actual Japanese characters in a web search, or are they smart enough to interprete the Unicode to proper language to produce search results?

bill

4:43 am on Dec 1, 2006 (gmt 0)

As long as the encoding is set to the proper character set and the page is viewable in a browser I don't see what the problem would be for search engine spiders.

Set the language of the page to Japanese in the <html> tag like this:

<html lang="ja">

leunga

10:00 am on Dec 1, 2006 (gmt 0)

You need to set the html page's meta to include charset as utf-8 in order for the NCR character displayed correctly. It is quiet sure that major search engines will pick them up. leung

GrendelKhan TSU

2:52 am on Dec 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

this won't work once you hit korea. or at least... not work in any way that really matters. :/

bill

5:53 am on Dec 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

Which won't work in Korea? The Unicode in the source?

GrendelKhan TSU

6:58 am on Dec 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

Which won't work in Korea? The Unicode in the source?

sorry...runnign around crazy today so wasn't clear. :/

yes.

1. unicode in the source will not work for some of the search engines.

2. even for those that is does work...doesn't matter much, because as most around here know...

- SEO doesn't amount to much out here as organic listings are buried big time.
- And you'd be luckily to be crawled anyway without registering your site with each portal first.
- This seems to be even more so if you are hosting on a non-korean server.
- And doing well on SEO with Google Korea doesn't mean much either as they have negligible market share (as of this post).

*sigh*
its no wonder "korean internet" is still a mystery to most outside its borders.

zCat

7:42 am on Dec 4, 2006 (gmt 0)

1. unicode in the source will not work for some of the search engines.

Does that mean Korean search engines don't like Unicode encoding per se, or they just don't like Unicode entities?

GrendelKhan TSU

8:09 am on Dec 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

Does that mean Korean search engines don't like Unicode encoding per se, or they just don't like Unicode entities?

its more that they seem to give preference to just "pure korean" ones. could be wrong on that...but that's from my experience.

doesn't exclude them... just once again, it rarely seems like a worthwhile battle given all the factors against SEO here in Korea.

to put it bluntly, go local or don't bother (or pay lots of money).