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What language to use for URL's for Russian language?
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Hi,
Our site is in English, Spanish, Danish and Russian - the URL's are individual to the language they are in, but of course, Russian contains some strange characters so I decided not to use them in the URL's
Any advice on how to create the URL's for russian language pages?
thanks
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Hi,
Technically if your cms and server can handle incoming urls with utf8 characters in them then you should be ok. I have seen some instances where the setup does not like them and produces 404 errors when you try to include these characters in the url, but most times it is fine. Google will display utf8 urls in the search results without problem (check out the wikipedia result here)
There is a further consideration though which is one I face a lot with Greek (similar to russian in some ways) which is how these urls are shared in mails, social media etc. A lot of the times these urls end up getting automatically url encoded and the url shown in the mail or facebook etc is a long, long string of url encoded characters which is impossible to read, gives no indication of what the page is about and generally looks bad (try putting that link above into facebook....nasty). For this reason I usually choose to do 'greeklish' urls which is a latin character representation of the greek characters. There are usually some common practices in regards how the local language is 'recreated' in latin characters, there are for Greek, I would assume there are for Russian also. So with that in mind, if you have a russian speaker who is familiar with that kind of thing I would be inclined to make the urls themselves 'russianlish'.
My two cents!
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Listen to Matt Cutts awesome answer here LOL!!!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suTDT6-Q8NE
I think your special characters may depend on the search engine. Go to Russia's search engine and find out if your URLs display better there: http://www.yandex.com/
I believe Yandex is more popular there than Google is.
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