The truth about using diacritics in SEO

The myth that Google has learned Romanian is partially true

Diacritics are characters which are not well understood by search engines. Analyzing latest years statistics, it was observed that the internet surfers are between 25-40 years old, and have been grouped in the category of people who have adapted quickly to new technologies and for whom diacritics are just signs on a keypad that confuse them rather than help.

The fact that Google learned Romanian is partially true because the search engine can recognize just a part of these typographic signs, but, even so, Google doesn’t know what they actually mean. Moreover, it will hasten to display results without diacritics because they are easier recognized than specific Romanian characters which use diacritics.

Even if you use diacritics, the SEO optimization process is done based on a strategy that has keywords in the center of attention. Once solved the keywords dilemma, we head to the website’s text transposition, to menus, images or logos. And there comes another question: is it reallyimportant if we use diacritics or not for an efficient SEO optimization?

We say it is. Because 99% of the Romanians who search something in Google don’t use diacritics. Usually, this type of writing is efficient because it doesn’t need the attention or the effort that must be invested in the case of normal writing, with diacritics.

But ultimately, the choice of writing is up to everybody.

Regardless of the platform used, I bet you’ve visited websites where diacritics look different than than the standard ones. This is a sign you must take into account. Why are they looking like that? Because those websites and blog platforms don’t recognize diacritics as text characters.

Why you shouldn't use diacritics

• it is more difficult – writing with diacritics can be considered a finger gymnastics for the internet users because they don't know where they are on the keypad

• without diacritics, writing is faster and the risk of making typos is much smaller

• diacritics shouldn’t be used in permalinks

But more about writing with diacritics in a future article.