International SEO insights from our copywriters around the world
The world of multilingual and international search engine optimization offers plenty of food for thought.
Accents pose a constant problem for search engine optimization in many countries. Because they cannot be used in domain names or email addresses there is a temptation to search by substituting with the same letter but without the accent. This, of course, can change the meaning of the word. In Italy, a person whose last name is Canè, for example, would become Cane (meaning “dog”)! Another, albeit rather comical, example of accent substitution comes from Turkey, where they have the letter ‘i’ with a dot and the letter ‘ı’ without a dot. When the word “sık” (meaning “frequent”) is written with a dot (sik), it is a slang term for male genitals – so when people search for “frequently asked questions” for instance, they often come across porn sites!
In Japan, the same word can be written in four different ways – and the search results will differ depending on which spelling is used. You’ll get the largest number of search results if you use kanji (Chinese characters); the second largest if you use hiragana (phonetic characters for Japanese words); the third largest if you use katakana (phonetic characters representing English words); and finally the lowest number of search results will be generated by roman letters.
In countries that share a common language like in Spanish-speaking countries, differences in vocabulary can often pose a problem for SEO. There are 40 million people in Spain who use the word “coche” for “car”. However, this word is not used at all in Argentina. In fact, the term “carro” is preferred by millions of Spanish-speaking people in Latin American countries (60 million people in USA, 100 million in Mexico, 43.5 million in Colombia, 25 million in Venezuela and so on). The problem is that, in Spain and some other Latin American countries, “carro” only means “cart, wagon or trolley” and not “car”. As a result, the best word to use in search engines is something completely different! “Auto” has recently been adopted by the whole Spanish-speaking community as the universal word for “car” and is likely to receive more hits, although certainly not all of them.
Arabic presents particular problems for SEO. Although “classic” Arabic is the same throughout the Middle East, colloquial expressions differ dramatically from one country to another. The regions could be grouped as follows: the Gulf; Yemen; the Sham (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan); Egypt; and North Africa. Each group shares some of the same colloquial expressions and culture.
The names of modern objects tend to differ from one Arabic country to the next.
Take, for example, the word for “mobile phone”. In Kuwait, this is called 'Naqqal' (literally “mobile”), whereas in Saudi, it's referred to as 'Jawwal' (literally “roaming”). Another example is “password”. In Kuwait, this is known as 'Kalimat al-Sir' (literally “secret word”), whereas in Jordan, it’s called “kalimat al-muroor” (literally “password”). These kinds of differences make SEO a particular challenge.
One of the main differences between Russian and English language search engines is how they handle Russian morphology. In Russian, for example, some nouns can have up to 12 different forms, and the stem of the word often changes too. To compensate for this, the search algorithms in Russia are different from the ones based on English rules.
Also in Russia, Yandex and Google (unlike Rambler.ru) offer search results even if you make a typo. What’s more, they both offer results for singular and plural forms of the word you are searching for. These search engines have also started to recognize deliberate spelling mistakes or slang, for example “Preved,” a popular Russian word derived from the word “Privet” (meaning “hello”).
Baidu.com is China’s number one search engine. It uses pinyin (a way to write Chinese pronunciation using roman characters), which is probably one of the reasons why it is used by more people than Google in China (Google.cn tends to be used more by the business community). Google China has registered its domain as g.cn – this short format is easier to type on a non-western character keyboard.
To find out more, contact Guy Gilpin on 020 7183 0983 or guy (at) mothertongue.com