October 15, 2007
How Do You Optimize a URL for Arabic Sites?
On Cre8asite Forums, Rand Fishkin asks an interesting question: how do you create search-friendly URLs out of foreign characters, particularly Arabic?
Ammon Johns says that DMOZ can handle it, so it should be spiderable content.
A.N.Onym says that he creates the URLs to look friendly to native Arab speakers:
One thing that our local webmasters do is to write the words using Latin letters for the corresponding letters from the language. While it doesn't help with the search engines, it makes the URLs appear in the native language (albeit using Latin alphabet) and such URLs are easier to use (remember, refer and link to), too.
Pierre aka eKstreme has subsequently responded in his own blog post with a few considerations.
How do you optimize URLs for a foreign language that doesn't use the Latin character set?
Forum discussion continues at Cre8asite Forums.
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Tamar Weinberg in Search Engine Optimization at October 15, 2007 10:00 AM
Comments (2)
Comments
It's an interesting technical question but it also belies the overeliance that people place on tricks and formulas to optimize for search. You can do it without links, page titles, and page URLs if all that stuff is taken away from you.
SEOs should avoid the practice of OVERoptimizing new query spaces from the start -- why make your job harder in the long run by showing the competition everything you can do, especially when you don't need to use every gimmick in your utility belt for every query?
Posted by Michael Martinez at October 15, 2007 15:19