Forum Moderators: not2easy
I currently own and/or administer four different websites. All of them are in Spanish. In Spanish, accents are an important part of the language (as in French and other languages), and writing without them doesn't look good, doesn't give a good impression and can badly hurt readability.
I once read that I shouldn't use any special characters (accents and others) because it could cause me some problems with search engines and affect my rankings. My question is: Do you think I should use accents or not? Could it affect my rankings in search engines? If a visitor of my site doesn't have an Spanish enabled browser, will he/she get strange characters where an accent should be?
I have done some tests and it seems searches in Google are only slightly affected by words with and without accents, but any feedback on this issue will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
All the best,
Daniel Levy
A simple search on 'café' and 'cafe' will show that Google treats accented characters as completely different letters. While this is gramatically correct, it plays havoc with attempts to optimize a site.
danlevy: In general, leaving the accents off will get you the most traffic (although not necessarily Spanish traffic), but you'll end up having a site full of what are essentially misspellings.
Thank you very much for answering to my post. You know, sometimes I get "traffic fever" and I forget the real issue is to please your visitors and conversion. Having a neat site with all its accents can definitely help the later.
I have been doing some research on this issue today and visiting other forums, and the outcome is:
- Ranks for my main keywords with or without accents are only slightly affected - sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse - by searches in Google.
- I another forum I got a very similar answer to yours: "Target YOUR customers".
- I also found a thread discussing French accents. The overall opinion was it's better when you use accents for both visitors and search engines. For the non accent visitors you can use your ALT text in images, buttons and title tag.
- It's a good idea to hard code your content after the <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> tag. Example dificil (without accent - means difficult in Spanish) and difícil (with accent - difícil). Dreamweaver does it automatically.
I will go for using accents in all the copy in all of my pages but I will keep non-accent words in my ALT text and Title Tags of some pages. I will monitor how it works and then make changes if necessary. If you are interested the results I will let you know.
Thanks again for answering to my post. :-)
Best Regards,
Daniel Levy
You might also regard it as a question of cultural pride. Your way of writing in a language shows the level of respect that you have for that language and for the people who read it. (At least it does so if your competence in that language is at a higher level than mine is in English!)
You have to make your choice.
For words that have different meanings in English, then they bring up different results (i.e., café & cafe. é does bring up Spanish news results however). For words that don't, they bring up the same (i.e., boletin / boletín). .com or .es.
So, if you're a Spanish site dealing with a Spanish market, you should probably write with an accent, as this is correct Spanish.
Google (AFAIK) seems to be assuming that words with accents, tildes, circumflexes etc are by native speakers. Remember, it's only in English that we really start mixing up words like café and cafe (different meaning which start evolving into words like caffe!)
