IDN's & SEO

[fab]

I noticed that while generic.com's (e.g., cars.com in Google is #1 for cars) very often are in the top 10 in the search engines, while idn.com is rarely the case.

Does anyone have any info on this. Moreover I was building my choices based upon overtures of the generic terms, since those may not have type in, but for development would be usefull, e.g., if cars idn had an ovt., of 1k, than if it turned out on the top 10 for that search term, it would be evective and valuable.

[none]

IE7 was just released to the public in beta. Before this there was no reason to create websites with IDN urls because noone could access them except Firefox users. This is a good question when there are many more websites using IDN urls -- my ballpark would be a year.

I don't see any reason why keywords in an IDN domain would be treated any differently, after all, we see unicode in the meta description and meta titles rendered properly, which tells me the SEs don't distinguish between ASCII and unicode -- and rightly so.

[Yojimbo]

Wouldn't Google show results based upon your IP? I'm in the U.S. so I'm not sure what use it would be to me to have Google show IDN related domains in the search results. Perhaps in Japan the IDN for cars.jp would show up number 1?

Just my guess.

[DNWizardX9]

Wouldn't Google show results based upon your IP? I'm in the U.S. so I'm not sure what use it would be to me to have Google show IDN related domains in the search results. Perhaps in Japan the IDN for cars.jp would show up number 1?

Just my guess.

not quite... type the japanese word for cars in www.google.co.jp

[fab]

Wouldn't Google show results based upon your IP? I'm in the U.S. so I'm not sure what use it would be to me to have Google show IDN related domains in the search results. Perhaps in Japan the IDN for cars.jp would show up number 1?

Just my guess.

I think you misunderstood me. If you have a Japanese accesible keyboard and enter cars in japanese, regardless of your ip it should show Japanese web-sites. My question is should it favor cars.com in Japanese.

[DNWizardX9]

I think you misunderstood me. If you have a Japanese accesible keyboard and enter cars in japanese, regardless of your ip it should show Japanese web-sites. My question is should it favor cars.com in Japanese.

of course

[Yojimbo]

I see. Well, Google seems to have a hard enough time trying to get relevent search results in english so I'm not sure how well they will do with IDN's and foriegn languages.

[Edwin]

The problem is that right now there are very few "serious" sites (i.e. sites with significant content and where an effort has been made to SEO them) using IDN, so the approach of thinking up a keyword and testing it to see if IDN sites show up is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

I know it sounds a bit circular, but you should first try and find a popular IDN site, then look to see what generic keyword the domain name contains, search on that keyword and see if the IDN site you identified comes up first in the results. That's the only way to do an even halfway "accurate" test at this early stage of the game...

If I had to guess - and it is a guess based on gut feel and experience - I would expect IDN to SEO better in the long term because of the "double helping of keywords effect".

For example, if I have a Japanese site about bookmarks and it's at "bookmarks.com" then links to it might look like this...

<a href="http://www.bookmarks.com/">ブックマーク</a>

On the other hand, if I owned the Japanese IDN form of "bookmarks" and I was confident that browsers could resolve it, I could link to the site as

<a href="http://www.ブックマーク.com/">ブックマーク</a>

and suddenly I've got the keyword twice into the link, without overly "stuffing" it.

Also, sites quite often post unsolicited links to other sites based on the domain only rather than some tidy description i.e.

<a href="http://www.dnforum.com/">dnforum.com</a>

- if the domain itself was an IDN even that type of link would automatically contain the keyword!

[KwelX]

fab..fyi - google changes it's indexing of IDNs pretty frequently. I've been registering IDNs for over a yr now. Some months when searching certain IDNs google will list them along with their "normal" term. Some months a google search for the same IDN will result in just the IDN results.

My point is that google has been well aware of IDNs and they are placed into search results by both google and yahoo.

So to answer your question, I would say yes, it's just as good if not better to own the correct IDN for a term for SEO.

[Olney]

You know Edwin
I just Freaked when you used Bookmark.com & Bookmark.jp as an example in Japanese.

I was thinking Oh My God I know I wanted that Japanese IDN domain before.
Then I typed it in by hand in Japanese & it was still available then I reread your post. I was mispelling it when typing it in by hand.

Then I copied & pasted it quickly....
All the 3 main extensions were gone. jp com & net.

I started to think man Edwin beat me to it & was using his purchase as an example.

Then I looked at ブックマーク.com the whois.....

I Already own it.......:-D

[Edwin]

I know - little tip of the hat to the main IDN guy

[puxa2]

I'm making an IDN site now to test in the search engines. One thing that has me a little concerned is how Google will react if it somehow indexes the site with both urls, the punycode and unicode. Wouldn't want some sort of duplicate content penalty.

[Olney]

I did this months ago & already blogged about it...

[puxa2]

Cool.

[touchring]

I'm making an IDN site now to test in the search engines. One thing that has me a little concerned is how Google will react if it somehow indexes the site with both urls, the punycode and unicode. Wouldn't want some sort of duplicate content penalty.

If you map those urls to the same Hosting server by DNS, i do not think there will be a penalty, and each url might be given a different pagerank. I might be wrong though.

[puxa2]

Yeah, I want to do a Portuguese site.

[fab]

I noticed something else today. When I type in a search term in Google it favors the translated or transliterated term in English. I have a parked site that I tyoed in another language and it showed up in top ten.

[touchring]

I noticed something else today. When I type in a search term in Google it favors the translated or transliterated term in English. I have a parked site that I tyoed in another language and it showed up in top ten.

Google's algo always change, go for what is most sensible - the correct term.

[Edwin]

Bear in mind that each local Google favours results of that country's language. So if you're searching from Google.com and your OS is English, Google will "prefer" English results, although ultimately you should be able to find other results too.

[fab]

Bear in mind that each local Google favours results of that country's language. So if you're searching from Google.com and your OS is English, Google will "prefer" English results, although ultimately you should be able to find other results too.

I was actually searching from a foreign Google, with that foreign language.