Forum Moderators: open
how are the meta tags to be defined, as the html representation of the character & a u m l ; or as the real character itself (like in a word processor)?
any online information available on this?
thanks for any help!
The question you pose is an interesting one. It has always been my understanding that extended letters should not be transcribed if placed in title or meta. Indeed, the HTML editor I use doesn't transcribe anything placed inside the <HEAD> element. BUT:
Different search engines appear to treat this in different ways. Some will render "ä" correctly if typed as it is into the source code. Others will render something illegible in its place. If you write the letter as & a u m l ; (without the spaces) some engines will present it exactly that way, while others will present it as "ä".
I think the time has come to address this issue and maybe make a list of search engine peculiarities in this respect. The topic has probably been discussed earlier here at WmW, so I will see what I can find in other fora. In the meantime:
Can we have some help with this, anyone?
... and thank you for the information.
so, it seems to be better, not to use extended characters in the meta tags.
if you find more information, please let me know. this is a really interesting question.
i really do appreciate your help!
We have discussed this matter here before, and as far as I remember the conclusion is that you should use the letters as is. Type the correct letter into the source code and don't go for emulations (& a u m l ; )
The search engines have software to tell different languages from each other, and they are actually quite good at figuring it out.
Personally I've always used the letters as is (Ø,Æ,Å etc.) and it have worked great so far.
See this [webmasterworld.com] tread concerning meta tags language support :)
Edit: Darn html tags fixed
It has been touched upon elsewhere, which yielded this useful link:
[malibutelecom.com...]
Will see if I can get some expert in here with more.
Theoretically, you should use & a u m l ;. That's what the html specification says in [w3.org ]. Any HTML 2.0 or later conforming User Agent is supposed to understand that. A User Agent is the thing that is interpreting the HTML, in this case the web spider.
You can help a spider interpret things correctly by using a lang attribute to tell the spider what language the meta tag is represented in. The format for language tags is given in RFC3066, which can be found at [ietf.org ]. The language tags are shown in [lcweb.loc.gov ].
An example of a meta tag using the lang attribute would be:
<meta name="Author" lang="de" content="Würzer"></meta>
Now that's the theory. In practice, do spiders actually interpret it right? I don't know.
suchfibel.de also recommends not to use extended characters in the meta tags in order to achieve better rankings:
Dürfen Umlaute in den Metas verwendet werden?
Ja, sollten verwendet werden. Theoretisch sollten die Suchdienste mit Entities (ä = ä etc) klarkommen, praktisch ist die Trefferquote bei normalen Umlauten besser.
