Accented characters representation in the URL

Question

We have support for various languages in our website, including Spanish, French and Swedish.

For now, the links in the site are NOT encoded before sent to the browser, sending the real accented chars (if such exists, i.e. href="www.(dot)example(dot)com/héllo.html") and not their HEX representation.

This works & looks good on all browsers, including Chrome, FF and IE.

However, we care great deal about SEO.

We got this tip that encoding the links before sending them to the browser (so instead of linking to http://www.example.com/héllo, we will link to http://www.example.com/h%E9llo) will improve the way search engines will 'understand' the links and the keywords in the URL.

This involves some work at our side, so we wanted to know if there's truth in that tip, but couldn't find anything addressing this issue.

Answer 1

According to Google:

Yes, we can generally keep up with UTF-8 encoded URLs and we’ll generally show them to users in our search results (but link to your server with the URLs properly escaped). I would recommend that you also use escaped URLs in your links, to make sure that your site is compatible with older browsers that don’t understand straight UTF-8 URLs.

So encoding your URLs seems like it would be search engine friendly. But your best bet may be to just remove those special characters and replace them with the "non-special" alternatives. This StackOverflow answer shows some awesome code for doing that:

Try these functions:

<?php
function Slug($string, $slug = '-', $extra = null)
{
  return strtolower(trim(preg_replace('~[^0-9a-z' . preg_quote($extra, '~') . ']+~i', $slug, Unaccent($string)), $slug));
}

function Unaccent($string)
{
  return html_entity_decode(preg_replace('~&([a-z]{1,2})(?:acute|cedil|circ|grave|lig|orn|ring|slash|th|tilde|uml);~i', '$1', htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8')), ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
}
?>

And use it like this:

<?php 
echo Slug('Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn of Glaño'); // internationalizaetion-of-glano
?> 

You can embed the Unaccent() code into the Slug() function if you wish to have only one function.