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I wonder of you are talking about translating into Asian words?
Or making the file name into a sounds like? If it is the latter, I'm pretty sure it would have little or no value because it wouldn't relate to the keyword.
If you are selling say, telegu movies, your file name would be telegu.htm.
I don't think Google would differentiate an Asian file name to an English file name. A file name is a filename, and if it is a keyword related file name, all the better.
If you are concerned about Google putting less value on it because it is Asian, maybe you could also run an English version.
Hope that makes sense ... I'm sure an Asian friend will bale me out here :)
There is some discussion about the benefit of keywords in the URL. No doubt there will be a better ranking, if your pages are linked with the URL as link text. Most inbound links however go to the home page. And the link text for your internal linking, is up to you.
I see no reason why Japanese words in URLs should be treated different from words in other languages. So if it helps in English, then it will do so in Japanese too.
Onya
Woz
are you talking about romanisations of hiragana/katakana/kanji as file-names?
No, the real hiragana, katakana and kanji. I will give a few examples with queries on www.google.co.jp (Google Japan).
To prevent problems with fonts, the examples will be in English, but the links will have the real search string.
inurl:<n-hiragana> [google.co.jp]
inurl:<link-katakana> [google.co.jp]
inurl:<Japan-kanji> [google.co.jp]
I must admit, the number of pages found by Google for these queries is lower than I expected. But these examples prove that Google will index such pages and can retrieve pages on a search on the URL in katakana, hiragana and kanji.
>lower than I expected
Which means there is a lot of territory there waiting to be plundered As Long As there are sufficient searches to warrant the effort. Which then begs the question what would be the ratio of Japanese surfers searching in:-
a) English,
b) Japanese Characters per your example,
c) Romanisation of Japanese, (is there such a thing?) or
d) Something Else.
Again, excuse my ignorance if I am asking something non-sensible.
Onya
Woz
There is no such thing as a stupid question.
>> Which then begs the question what would be the ratio of Japanese surfers searching in:
Okay, I will try to answer it. I have no hard numbers; so if other members don't share my opinion, please post it in this thread.
a) English
The number of Japanese who are proficient in English is not so high. And those who have a high level will usually search in their native language. But I think that will be true for almost any nationality if there is enough information to find on Internet in the native language. I expect that to some extend even computer terms, foreign names of cities, celebrities, and brand names will be searched in Japanese. On general, a search will only be in English if somebody knows that a search in Japanese will not give enough information.
b) Japanese Characters per your example
That will be the usual search. Although there are several ways to write words. Sushi is normally written in kanji, but hiragana is not unusual. Tobacco (tabako) is usually written in katakana, but you can see it also in hiragana. Rose or eagle can be written in rather complex kanji. Especially young people don't even know the kanji. Most people will search them in katakana or hiragana.
c) Romanisation of Japanese, (is there such a thing?) or
Yes, there is. That's how a lot of Japanese text is entered on a qwerty-keyboard (although there are also keyboards with both qwerty and hiragana). Most domain names will be written this way. But then there is a problem with how to convert to 'romaji'. My city can be written as Tokio, Tokyo, and Toukyou. Few searches will be done like this.
d) Something Else.
What else? The only thing I can think of is some minority groups (Koreans born in Japan, expats living in Japan) using other encodings. But that is outside the scope of this thread.
Now I am hosting on shared english Linux and if I upload japanese named file it appears as?_?*~@.htm. So unless you are hosting on japanese OS you are unable to use japanese file names.I'll bet that most of those sites with Japanese file names and directories are run off of Windows boxes. I have an old Japanese IIS NT4 server on one of my Intranets and I remember strictly telling the Japanese staff to use English (or at least Romaji) file names...but did they listen to me? No. I found tons of Japanese directory & file names shortly thereafter. The problem was that it was a real PITA to type in the URLs even on a Japanese OS, and people without a Japanese OS were having trouble.
You could try using .htaccess to have a Japanese file name for the visitor of your site, but the real file is still in romaji (letters). For a few files that would do. It could however become a maintenance problem if you have a lot of files.
Or maybe you could rename the files after uploading, if your FTP program supports Japanese input.
Well, see what you can do.
Good luck (gambatte ne).
These same issues/problems/questions are VERY similiar when talking about Korean (korean and japanese are much more similiar grammatically and pheonetically to each other, then Chinese. Kinda like romance languages vs. Latin)
Some differences for Korea would be:
It's very common to search in for words in english, but still the majority of searches will be in Korean (using korean characters). The general rule in Korea is that...you use BOTH english and Korean for keywords, links, whatever....ratio varies on your goals of course.
Romanized Korean is basically only useful for explaining how to pronounce a korean word. :P No one searches for romanized versions of korean words unless its a known brand ("daum" "hyundai" etc...)
You can register korean character domain names (which is utilized by a separate search feature much like AOL keywords, but in any browser), but it's not prevalent and certainly debatable as useful at all for Goog Korea. Domain names should be in english. dot com is still the main top level domain, but .co.kr domain names are on the rise in terms of default top level domains.
Saving files with Korean characters names doesn't seem to be an issue as far as I've seen. This causes trouble for older english OS computers, but if you have the Asian character set installed with an english version XP (or NT servers) its fine (as far as I've seen). But don't hold me to that. Gibberish seems to only come out based on browser encoding setting.
Again, I'd just do both.
Even if Google can cope with the non-English file names, what about other search engines. Given the changes going on in the market with Yahoo buying out Inktomi and Microsoft's new search robot who knows if they would support non-English file names.
To me the risk does not match the return, at least not at the moment.
Yahoo buying out Inktomi and Microsoft's new search robot who knows if they would support non-English file names.
Well Korea is unique among the international Yahoo's in that Inktomi does NOT server its search results. A local Korean company Softwise does. And they have a solid relationship. And yes, they obviously deal with Korean character sets. MS...well....they certainly have the ability to make a product that deals with local language sets...but frankly MSN is not very popular as search engine in Korea.
To me the risk does not match the return, at least not at the moment.
that's why I said...do both! :D no way to know the return otherwise...(maybe Asia turns out to be a big market for whatever someone's site is).
using overture tool compare search for "new zealand" in english and japanese (kana), 98% of all searches handled by japanese overture are in japanese, only 2% are english. very similar figures for korean, go to europe and o/ture german returns 88% of searches in german, 12% in english.
the big question is, who ends up buying product on-line? those searching in the local language or those searching in english?
