Cyrillic letter in URL - Encoding

[Kennethskonto]

Hi all

We are launching our site in Russia.

As far as I can see by searching Google all sites have URLs in latin letters.

Is there a special reason for this? - It seems that cyrillic letters also work.

My technical staff says that it might give some encoding problems.

Can anyone give me some insight into this?

Thanks in advance..

/ Kenneth

[Flowrox]

Hi,

I have exactly the same issue as described above. Has anything changed since 2012? What is the rule of thumb when it comes to Russian URLs, is it best to keep the in Cyrillic or convert them to Latin characters?

I did notice the URLs in Cyrillic get broken when copy-pasting them and also Moz crawlers detect them as too long. What about Google's crawlers, do they see it any differently?

Thanks,

Anja

[Dr-Pete]

If you're targeting for Russian queries on Google.ru and your target audience is primarily entering queries with Cyrillic characters, then then Cyrillic URLs should be ok. It used to be that non-Latin character support was poor, but I think that's changed a lot over the past couple of years.

Here's a relevant Google support thread where John Mu chimes in:

http://www.google.com.ag/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=489ece0479e0d33d&hl=en

Technically, Google can crawl/index these pages. For example, the Russian version of Wikipedia seems to be using Cyrillic URLs:

http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D1%8C%D1%8E%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%80

(unfortunately, that URL does get broken when I cut/paste)

The big question to me would be whether searchers are in the habit of using Latin characters in searches, and whether those searches draw more volume than Cyrillic. Unfortunately, we don't have any Russian speakers here on staff, so I can't comment on that one. I do speak a little Mandarin Chinese, and I've seen a mix in that market, too. Some URLs use simplified characters and some use Pinyin (the Romanized version). Technically, either should work, but there are still some legacy effects of the times when only Latin characters were supported.