Which is Google Optimimal for Non-English Languages?

Unicode or just ignoring the accents and such?

[Rollo]

I'm wondering if anyone has a clue about what is search engine optimal in the case of accents and other non-English language characters (assuming Latin script).

For example, take: ¿Dónde está mi línea? (Where is my line?)

Let's say I want to make this the meta title of a page. Would it be better to put:

A) Donde esta mi linea?

or

B) ¿Dónde está mi línea? (the unicode)

Or, does it even matter?

Thanks!

[lammert]

My experience with words in Dutch language is that Google converts characters with accents first to the character without accent and then does the searchword comparison.

I have used UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 character sets and &e...; methods and Google seems to convert them all correctly.

My advice is to use accents where your language needs them.

[PatrickDeese]

My experience in G is that with the exception of Ñ, the letters are treated the same whether it is e, é or é

I have sites in Spanish, French and German.

[jrodegheri]

If it's www.google.com the word will be considered more relevant to the search (will come higher positioned) if the accent matches.

And I think they do well, because some words differ only in terms of accent from language to language. For example, "inglés" (Spanish) in Portuguese is "inglês", "formula 1" (English) in portuguese is "Fórmula 1" etc.

But when it comes to www.google.com.br (Brazilian Google) it makes no difference. The results are exactly the same no matter if the Google user types the graffic accent or not.

So my advice is, if you're concerned only with your public, from your county, using your country's version of Google, do put all the graffic accents. It will look better (will not look so carelessly) to the visitor and they will get there the same way if they don't type the accents on Google.yourcountry .

Considering, of course, that your country's Google ignores graffic accent just like Brazilian's does! (Check that searching for something both ways)

[Rollo]

Just for the record that should be Optimal not Optimimal, though perhpas it is "subliminable"...