How will "foreign" characters in new EU domains behave in Google?

[vampke]

Hi peoples,

The EU yesterday launched a new type of domain names: domains with "foreign" characters (clearly the term applies only to those in countries with languages that do not use these characters), the likes of é è à ü etc...

Unfortunately the domains are not recognized "as is", but in stead are redirected to another domain like xn--thedomainnamewithoutthespecialcharacters-somemorerandomstuff.eu

Having ordered a domain already, i was rather disappointed finding this out.

The real question here is: how will this affect a website's ranking in google results? Will google index these pages with the foreign characters or will they be indexed with the xn--notation?

What about eu domains all together? I have found some old forum posts but none that could shed a light on the importance of them in google.
thanks

v.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:43 pm (utc) on Dec. 11, 2009]

[tedster]

Whether they are .eu or some other IDN (International Domain Names), all the expanded character domain names are translated into "punycode" for the user agent. So it's not just the .eu domains. And there is an exact formula for the "random stuff" that you can research if you are interested.

The domain name itself does not directly affect ranking, as far as I know at least. But an IDN certainly might make it more challenging to get accurate backlinks.