Non-english language special characters

How do search engines treat these, and what's the best approach?

[richmc]

I have a page which refers to a gas field whose name includes the 'Ř' character.

What's the best approach to creating keywords for the page?

Do Search Engines treat the Norwegian version as different to the nearest English equivalent (ie using 'o' instead), so I can repeat the name 3 times in each form safely?

[SmallTime]

I would think so, it is a different character. There are a couple encoding experts lurking around here, perhaps they will pipe up.

just saw this [webmasterworld.com...]

[Grumpus]

I was often wondering the same thing. I have several foreign films on my site and I was putting in "alternative spelling". In SQL, it doesn't seem to matter. And, though Google hasn't indexed this page on my own site, you can try this search: "Fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain, Le (2001)" The actual title of the film has Amelie spelled "Amélie", yet Google brings the IMDb page up with no problem.

G.

[richmc]

thanks the help so far!

ok, so what i've tried since I posted, based partly on advice here, is this:

After trying "Amélie" in Google it finds the official movie site, which after investigating the source code, seems to use purely the english equivalent "Amelie"

However...

Searching in Google with "Amélie": 255,000 results

Searching in Google with "Amelie": 405,000 results

In both cases the official site ranks highest, which I would guess is down to the sheer number of links to the page.

However there is clearly a distinction between the two forms (at least as far as Google is concerned).

What would be nice is a comparison of the main Search Engines capabilities with varying character sets. I'll maybe try and track something down.

[Sinner_G]

I suppose the difference is that Amelie returns all spellings while Amélie returns only results with the é.

[Grumpus]

I agree with Sinner_G.

e brings results with é in them.
é doesn't have resutls with e in them.
Interestingly, it doesn't seem to work for all letters. I just pulled another one that popped to mind from my database. Try "Kristanna Lřken".

Seems o doesn't find ř words. Granted, ř is the old "ZERO" from days of yore, so it might be an exception. I'll try a few others...

G.

[Sinner_G]

Damn, I have to disagree with myself :(.

I just tried the search for "Amelie" on google.ch with the following results:

Amelie: 218000 results
Amélie: 220000 results

The first SERP looks exactly the same though.

<added> As an afterthought, maybe the results differ due to the country language? Switzerland being partly french speaking, maybe google.ch is tuned a bit differently?</added>

[richmc]

Well, here's something from the FAQ on Google:

"Google's technology is sensitive to the precise spelling of foreign words. Spelling the word correctly with the appropriate foreign characters will significantly improve the quality of your search results as well as the number of hits."

Not that most people who use Google are going to have looked this far into their site...

[Sinner_G]

will significantly improve the quality of your search results

I understand this as meaning that the correct spelling will improve the quality of the results. That implies reducing the quantity, so it does explain why your search richmc gave you less results for Amélie, but not why mine did the opposite.

[richmc]

hmmm..

i'd interpret it exactly opposite!

"Improve the quality" I reckon means that the ranking of the sites returned is likely to be higher (as the keyword is more accurate, so theoretically more links to the sites returned exist).

"improve the quality of your search results as well as the number of hits"

sounds more like there are likely to be more hits to me.

It is a bit vague isn't it? :-¦

[richmc]

thinking on this further, the "quality and quantity" statement on Google's FAQ doesn't really take into account the dominance of English on the web..more Anglocised versions of a word might exist than accurate (for instance) Norwegian ones - which may be why the results we get differ.

[Sinner_G]

Did the search again, choosing the option only pages in Switzerland. Now I get Amelie 28,400 and Amélie 28,300 results.

I'm completely lost :(.