How SEO friendly is Unicode URL?

Question

As the title says, how SEO friendly is a URL containing Unicode characters.

Edit: To clarify, I meant URL with non-ASCII characters but valid Unicode.

Answer 1

I would guess from an SEO point of view it would be a really bad idea, unless you are specifically looking to target unicode search terms.

Answer 2

All URLs can be represented as Unicode. Unicode just defines a range of code-points from U+0000 to U+10FFFF, which allows you to define any characters.

If what you mean is "How SEO friendly are URLs containing characters above U+007F" then they should be as good as anything else, as long as the word is correct. However, they won't be very easy for most users to type if that's a concern, and may not be supported by all internet browsers/libraries/proxies etc. so I'd tend to steer clear.

Answer 3

if we consider that the urls that have the searched keywords in them have higher placements in the search results and you're targeting unicode search terms then it may actually help. But of course this is hardly the most important thing when it comes to position in search results.

Answer 4

FWIW, Amazon (Japan) uses Unicode URL for their product pages.

http://www.amazon.co.jp/任天堂-193706011-Wiiスポーツ-リゾート-「Wiiモーションプラス」1個同梱/dp/B001DLXXCC/ref=pd_bxgy_vg_img_a

(As you can see, it causes trouble with systems like the Stackoverflow wiki formatter)