Google and Special Chars

[Trax]

How does GoogleBot treat sites like www.ä.com or www.δ.com

i was offered a nice domain using such language specific chars. I however get redirected to verisign first. Does anyone know how google crawls those?

Thanks

[cabbie]

As far as I know verisign have talked about supporting special characters in .com and .net domains but haven't yet done so which is why they resolve back to verisign.
Also I don't think # ,& are allowed in domain names.
However,.info tlds are about to allow registration of special characters [domainregistry.de...]
and I know that .nu domains support some western european characters but it seems that of all the ones I have seen all have grey bar in googles toolbar which suggests to me that google has trouble reading them.e.g.
[omvärlden.nu...]

[GoogleGuy]

Cool. I learn something new every day. If the url escaping uses hyphens, 0-9, a-z, or A-Z, then you should be quite golden. Other special characters or escaping methods might work too, but I can believe that it would be less likely.

[adfree]

Special characters are still an issue with IE as well. As long as the top browser does not support them (and MS does not seem to move that way), there won't be too many developers owning and using them, ergo: G and others will not feel any heat on the topic.

Just my $0.02

[Trax]

sad :(
the omvärlden.nu example proves me right.
Sadly the domain is useless for me if google isnt able to read it.

GG: any chances of changes with google in the next months regarding those chars?

[zgb999]

I guess Google will treat those special caracters in a domain correctly one day but what you have to keep in mind is that though those domains are sold now most people won't be able to use them with their browsers.

This will probably change in coming years but right not those domains are not what they promise to be.

[cabbie]

If I understand what GoogleGuy says it depends on how the characters are translated into resolving as to how google reads the domain.

At present,I think, a domain with special characters must first be converted into a normal character string without special characters.I think the powers to be are working on a industry standard.
here is a link to whats involved in IDNS.
[verisign.com...]

[takagi]

See also the thread: æøå domains - When will it be safe to start using non-english characters? [webmasterworld.com]

[tschild]

At present,I think, a domain with special characters must first be converted into a normal character string without special characters.I think the powers to be are working on a industry standard

That's already standardized (RFC 3492). IDNs cannot work without this ASCIIfied representation (the ACE string) as the DNS system uses this as the "real" domain name. For example, www.ä.com is 'really' (i.e. as far as the DNS system is concerned), www.xn--4ca.com. If you use this representation in links etc. all browsers can use the domain.

[GoogleGuy]

I believe what tschild said makes a lot of sense. A "special" character gets escaped into a longer string of normal characters. I think we can handle those domains just fine, but I'm not positive. The next time I see someone who works on i18n, I'll ask them to check out this thread though. :)