Comments on: Accented Characters, Symbols and Special Characters in HTML Documents: Considerations for Search Engine Optimization, Usability and XML Feeds.

By: Carlo Milani

Carlo Milani — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:08:34 +0000

So do you confirm that in the description, keywords and title meta tags “attività” will be read and parsed by the bots the same way as “attività”?

By: Federico Bucchi

Federico Bucchi — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 11:08:08 +0000

What’s the html entity of #?

By: Igor - PortalPress

Igor - PortalPress — Sun, 22 May 2011 09:51:42 +0000

["data"]=> string(3) “æ»” ["ord"]=> int(28397) ["xml"]=> string(8) “?”
I’ve developed a translation function which shows any character in any charactersetting. The example above was written in UTF-8, the charactersetting is ISO-8859-1 and the character itself is BIG-5 [Chinese]. I was wondering ìf search-engines could “see” the 滭 right and I trust you they will.

Thanks for your post.

Igor – PortalPress

By: Website localization

Website localization — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 21:30:18 +0000

I know this is an old post, but I agree only to a point. It is true that accented and non-accented characters provide very similar search results, but as I pointed out in one of the posts of my blog (http://www.seo-translator.com/do-search-engines-understand-your-localized-pages-4-%E2%80%93-how-to-ensure-language-recognition/), accented characters are used by some search engines for language recognition (check the use of language-characteristic words and letters section).the use of special characters can be used to ensure a correct language recognition by the search engine, and there are lots of complaints out there about incorrect language recognition! And what good will it do it if your search results appear in a language that the people searching for a certain keyword do not understand?

By: sean

sean — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 13:23:21 +0000

Andrea, you raise an interesting point.

In principle, you’re right, accented characters should be used instead of placing an apostrophe after the letter in question. Yet search engines must deal with what they find in the real world, especially when a particular usage is fairly common.

As you will surely know, Italians often use an apostrophe instead of typographically correct accented character. This is especially so with E’ instead of È…. so, linguistically, right or wrong, the search engines cannot and don’t generally ignore what is going on in the wild.

In the end, the point of this article was to get people to use numeric html entities as the preferred approach; perhaps I could have been clearer on this point.

By: Andrea

Andrea — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 07:43:00 +0000

I know that this is an old post, but I’ve ran into it just now and I’ve found this extremely wrong sentence “Instead of using an accented character, the accent is placed after the character, i.e. sara’ or sara` instead of sarà. This approach is often seen in Italy. While this approach is fine, use of accented characters can give a document a more professional look.”.

I’m Italian and I can assure you that is the use of “apostrophes” as a replacement of accents is wrong!. This is just a typical behavior of lazy people.

Also consider that not all accents are at the end of the word and that there is a difference between accent acute and accent grave, that you can’t simplify with a mere apostrophe.

For instance, how would you write “Vìola”? “Vi`ola”?

So, next time, before writing wrong information, make some serious investigation.