Japanese characters in filenames/URLs

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Japanese characters in filenames/URLs

Asia_Expat

8:08 pm on Mar 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

I'm about to put some Japanese translations of my site online... but I've delayed until I can come to a decision about the use of Asian scripts in the URL. I'd love to read some comments from someone with experience doing this. I realise it opens up a can of worms with tech issues but if I can make it work properly, I think it a logical step for the various translations I have planned for my website... Apart from the possible SEO gains, having English directory/filenames on a Japanese page somehow just looks wrong.

bill

4:34 am on Mar 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

We've had a bunch of threads that deal with this topic [bing.com]. DMOZ has been doing this for many years, but I haven't seen this catch on in any big Japanese sites. Why? Mostly because the Japanese ignore the URL and directory structure. Look at any of the posters in the trains/subway. Most of them use a "keyword" and a "search" button. It's hard to find the URL a lot of the time.

Asia_Expat

4:54 am on Mar 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

Wikipedia is also doing this. I manage my own server and I've got this working OK on a test page. I'm really tempted to go with this to see how it works... I'm just interested to read various peoples thought on why NOT to do it...

If so few websites do it, I'm thinking about keyword in URL advantage...

bill

5:20 am on Mar 16, 2010 (gmt 0)

I think we're not seeing this because of the problems involved and a possible lack of benefits. Possible problems could include:

Many mobile devices won't let you input non-romaji URLs at all. They dummy-proof the browsers' input to make sure that less-than-savvy users get it right. (e.g., you can't even switch to Japanese input mode)

The URLs won't work in forms if the double-byte characters get stripped out.

People who cant read Japanese can't type in your URL. This is a problem even in Japan.

If your link gets syndicated it's possible the Japanese portion could become gibberish via a 3rd party service.

That's off the top of my head...However, if you did do this I'd be interested to hear whether there's any keyword boost from Yahoo and Google Japan...or even Bing.