"a" versus an "a" with an accent

same keyword or different?

[moishe]

Howdy Ya'll,

I am wondering if anyone has done any testing on this to see how the SE's see things. I am building a website that has lots of places with accented a's in their names.

My content writer used the accented a's, should I take the accents out, change them to "á"...?

My biggest concern is how the accented a's will be indexed, the site is in English so most searchers will not have an accented "a" on their keyboard to type so I am assuming they will just type an "a".

What do ya'll think, what has your experience been?

M

[mona]

<bump> Bumping up this thread for ya, moishe. I don't know the answer, but maybe someone does?

[ronburk]

This is hard to tell with Google, since they seem to have an ever-expanding pool of synonyms. For example, searching for "Fräulein" immediately gets you pages that do not contain the accented "a" at all, but searching for "Fraulein" clearly more heavily favors pages that feature that spelling.

T'were me, I would certainly feature both spellings, making sure the unaccented version makes it into at least one "important" place, such as the title or H1 element.