International (greek) characters in the URL

[achatzakis]

For one of our sites we are considering restructuring the urls.

This is about a Greek site and we are toying between the following options:

a) English URLS

e.g. www.domain.com/cars

b) Greek URLs

e.g. www.domain.com/αυτοκίνητα

c) "Greeklish" URLs (Greek words spelled with latin characters)

www.domain.com/aftokinita

Normally we would imagine option b is the best since it would reinforce the main and most relevant keyword that is already present within the page content.

We see many people search in google using greeklish (e.g. they are lazy to switch the keyboard locale all the time). Since we would also like to capture this part of the SE traffic but cannot obviously write in "greeklish" within our main page content maybe option c is a good compromise?

[StalkerB]

It's all Greek to me!!! Ha ha, I'm hilarious

Anyway, Greek characters will give you a lot of headaches, you'll most likely end up with URLs looking like yousite.com/Δήμ after you click on them.

I have to work around a very similar issue and use the Greeklish (although not Greek) to have latin characters in the URLs. I'm not sure if Greek characters are w3 approved as things stand and although the web is getting better at non-latin characters, for the time being I wouldn't use them.