Where do Spiders look?

Source code problems with cyrillic letters

[Gary_Numan]

Hello again,

I haven't even had an answer to my first question yet and here I am asking more questions! Just who do I think I am?

Anyway, I am in the translation business, English to Russian. My site is primarily in English but there are certain sections which need to be written in Russian and that means using the Cyrillic alphabet.

I hope to attract visitors when they search in Russian. Google, and others, recognise Russian language searches, which is why I am adding these sections to my site.

When I enter the Russian text into my site it is fine, perfectly visible and clear to read. However, if I click 'View' then 'Source' all I see are strange symbols which is an obvious sign that it is not recognising the Cyrillic characters.

OK, so here is my question - When a spider comes to look at my page, will it see the page itself or the source code behind it? Becasue if it cannot index the words then it cannot list the site for a Russian search.

Always ready to learn more.

[JamesR]

Try looking at the source code of this site or any russian site:

gazeta.ru

[thehittmann]

These symbols are correct, it's the only way that browsers can interperate 2 languages in the same document. If you wanted to create entire pages in something other than english all you would need to do is specify so in your character declaration.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

This is the standard declaration for a page written in english

[tombola]

... and if you want to use several languages on one page, you can use UTF-8.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

To work properly, you must save your page as a Unicode document.

[Gary_Numan]

Thanks for all the postings on this topic, it seems as though everything is ok with what I want to do.

I will have to do my homework on those html codes though.

All the best

GN