Arabic Characters in URL - asp.net

I have created a website using DNN. The site has arabic characters in URL after the domain name. For example: http://www.example.com/اسعارالعملات.aspx.
My questions are:
Is this URL read by non Arabic supportive operating systems or browsers or will it give the user an error?
Is it good for SEO to have Arabic in URL or not?
Are there any other problems due to the use of Arabic characters?

Edit : To answer your question points directly.
[1] Yes they will work fine due to Internationalized Resource Identifiers.
[2] If you are targeting Arabic search results then yes having arabic in the url bar is good for SEO. I am sure Google does clever translation stuff tho as well.
[3] Copy pasting the URL will look funny due to [1] If you look at Arabic wikipedia and try copy paste their url somewhere you will see what I mean.
More information
I know Google does put some weight into what is in the url so for example having page-title.aspx will be better than pagetitle. I would imagine that the same rules apply for having foreign language urls - it will help increase results when people are searching for terms that are included in your arabic word.
Most browsers will deal with it fine I don't think you need to have a special language pack installed. Arabic Wikipedia works fine though the characters get mapped using Internationalized Resource Identifiers.
https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/15539/how-do-special-foreign-language-characters-in-an-url-work-and-are-they-fake
So will look fine in your url bar but will look like this http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B5%D9%81%D8%AD%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D8%A6%D9%8A%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A9 when copied.
I always liked how backspace and delete work the other way around with Arabic text.

I think a better way to make the link in number format as the url in arabic doesn't look ok on different search engines ( bing for example )
making the url readable by google not a big ( although it may count to be a good seo practice ) but there is many other good ways to help in that like page title and keywords in page and so on..

Related

Issues with translating certain strings

I'm having a bit of a major meltdown regarding a translation of a site. It's a wordpress site with a WooCommerce shop. LocoTranslate and Avada is installed.
The issue is, that some individual strings of text are not being translated - even when i've changed the .po file (with PoEdit).
For example, there's a string on the customer cart that says:
"hello USER (not USER? Sign out)"
In PoEdit it looks as such:
Hello %1$s (not %1$s? Sign out)
I'm adding a translation that says:
Hej %1$s (ikke %1$s? Log ud)
It's just not being updated on the site!
Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong??
There are 2 other words that won't be translated either :(
I work a lot with dual language WP sites and find this quite often. In most cases it dues to the textdomain being called before the strings in question are being called. In theory this shouldn't happen but it does. The solution that usually works for me is to add the textdomain a second time in yours functions file and use a hook that runs much later in the site loading process. This invariably fixes it although it a bit of a hack.
If this isn't working and you only need the site in one language you can create a child theme and manually translate the stubborn strings in the page template.

Officially stuck, need to convert link with the "Heavy Black Heart" unicode character across domains

A client had sent out a mass email using Constant Contact and all the links contained the unicode text character "Heavy Black Heart", all the available formats can be seen here http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2764/index.htm:
So the Constant Contact Mail Out has links that all similar to the following
http://www.wordpress.com/events/❤-heart-card-event-at-kendra-scott
They link to a 404 as they are parsed by Constant Contacts Engine and when clicked from the newsletter go through Constant Contact and become the following:
http://www.wordpress/event/❤-heart-card-event-christofle-2
So...
Because we cannot un-send the newsletter and Constant Contact is well a Constant, I'm stuck with trying to convert the Unicode heart from the unicode heart, back to the unicode heart after being parsed by Constant Contact.
Things I've Tried:
1.Changing the slug of the the event/post in wordpress, wordpress will not recognize the html &#x2764 and just ignores it upon saving.
2.Changing the slug link of the post/event to a%c2%9d%c2%a4 (the hex version escaped) for the heart, no good, it still comes out using the ❤ in and sending to a 404;
3.Trying to use the .htaccess mode_rewrites file to grab the html version of the url and redirect it to the Unicode hex version (really thought this would do it) nope, it still loads and directs to the good ol 404.
4.Using the strange already parsed resulting characters ( the A, big O, little O) in the slug, this one actually took and altered the slugs but still did not link to the url from the newsletter.
So now i'm just spinning wheels and still need the newsletter to link to the proper post/event page. Any Ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Just a note: My client thought the heart inside of a url would be cool and sent the letter by copying and pasting directly into the Constant Contact form. I'm assuming that CC takes the link and parses it using it's own system and then rebuilding the link for tracking so as far as I can tell, linking with a Unicode Text Character is a big "Do Not Try" no-one informed them of.
If the newsletter had not already been sent this would be a snap to fix but since it's already out, the only thing I can do is try and find a way to direct the links to the right wordpress posts/events.
Your biggest problem is the fact that anything after (and including) the hash is not sent to the server. So, in actual fact, your server sees the following URL request:
http://www.your-domain.com/event/&
So if you're trying to do a htaccess redirect, something like this should work:
Redirect /event/& /event/❤-heart-card-event-christofle-2
Or, if you can, I'd recommend removing the heart from the permalink and instead doing this:
Redirect /event/& /event/heart-card-event-christofle-2

fill out search on website and screen scrape result in r

this is my first post, so if my question is too vague or not clear, please tell me so.
I'm trying to scrape a website with news-articles for a research project. But the link to the modified search on that webpage won't work, because the intranet-authentication will spit out an error.
So my idea was, that I fill out the search form and use the resulting link to scrape the website.
Since my boss likes to work with R, he would like me to write an R-skript to do so, but I have no idea how to and haven't found anything working.
You need two packages: RCurl and XML.
The RCurl package is used for internet browsing. It can access HTML forms with _GET or _PUT arguments. So, with it you can login or fill out the any form.
The output from the server would be in HTML. If you want to grep the links, you can use XLM package. I helps to get any data form XML format.
But before start, you have to find out that is the search form in webpage (and that arguments should be used). The Firefox browser could be useful. You need two add-ins: Live HTTP header and Firebug. With those add-ins you can inspect webpage much more easier.
I know that it did not solve you problem, but I could not say any more, since it deepens on particular situation and webpage structure. I believe that the tool I have mentioned is quite enough to achieve that you want.
Bet regards.

How do I create canonical meta tags for mutli-lingual websites to improve SEO?

I have a company website (Visual Studio / VB / ASP.NET 4.0) and it's now localized in 10 different languages.
The problem: My URLs do NOT change when switching from, say, English to Swedish. Only the text changes, as it calls the information from the "sv" resource file instead of the "en" resource file. Stefan noted that this will not count against me for duplicate content.
But Tiggerito came up with an excellent suggestion. He suggested I use canonical tags in the section to intimate to SE bots that I have other languages. I'd like to follow his suggestion, and add canonical tags to my master pages.
Can anybody tell me how I can go about doing this? What would the tags look like, and would I have to have one for en, es-MX, ru, sv, fr, etc.? Thanks for any guidance you can offer!
First of all its not good SEO to have the same page, same url, with totally different content. You confuse the search engines that do not know what to show. What search machine index to show ? what language of all. This is not count as duplicate content but indexer see you like to change the page and the language too often and do not what to show.
Second, the canonical tag works only for google from what I know, and second its not take language as an argument. The canonical tag works the different way connect many different url with similar content to the one url, not split one url to many different contents.
Is better to have you home page your default language, and when you change language to change the url, or add a url parameter.
Here is a canonical tag.
<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/page.html"/>
About canonical tags
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
Notes
In this url that #JasonWeber give me
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multilingual-websites.html
say it very clear:
if you’re going to localize, make it visible in the search results
and
"And last but not least, keep the content for each language on separate URLs - don't use cookies to show translated versions."

Multi-lingual rss feed question

I paid a developer to write a script to generate an RSS feed for multiple languages for a site. My only question is that when I go to the URL for the XML that's generated, it doesn't show up in Korean, it shows up like...
&iacute;&dagger;&nbsp;&euml;&bdquo;&circ;&euml;&uml;&frac14;&iacute;&Scaron;&cedil;&euml;&yen;&frac14; &igrave;&curren;&euro;&euml;&sup1;&bdquo;&iacute;&bull;&tilde;&euml;&tilde;
I've never worked with multiple languages before, is there a header or something that should be added to this page? Is the <language> tag supposed to read <language>ko-kr</language> for Korean?
These are so called HTML entities. No header will change anything, as Korean characters (as well all the others) should be UTF-8 encoded. That's actually standard character encoding for XML and basically that's what should be used for multilingual RSS or ATOM feeds.

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