SEO-optimized Urls for Japan: English or Japanese Characters

[Troteclaser]

Hi,

Anyone got experience with Japanese Urls? I'm currently working on the relaunch of the Japanese site of the troteclaser.com and I wonder if we should use English or Japanese characters for the Urls.

I found some topics on the forums about this, but they only tell you that Google can crawl both without problems. The question is if there is a benefit if Japanese characters are used.

[ProductPearson]

My 2 cents is just to remember which Search Engine that country uses the most. I believe Yahoo is used more in Japan than Google is. So be sure to focus on your primary search engine target.

[David-E-Carey]

Hi there,

I've been doing work in Japan for some time now and although I would probably have my URL's in Japanese I found that if I hagoo sound meter data, correct charset for that language and good links from Japanese domains when the content of my pages are served pretty well. See example here - http://www.instantatlas.com/whatisinstantAtlas_JP.html

I would say that most traffic from the above page actually comes from Yahoo Japan than say Google Japan (it does come but not in the same volume). I have a Chinese equivalent and traffic to this landing page comes from Baidu. I would like to point out that for both pages they will drive Japanese, Chinese and English queries from these countries.

We are about to embark on an overhaul of this page to include easier navigation, structured data etc.

Happy to share outcomes on these change over the coming weeks if it helps.

Best

David

[Troteclaser]

Thanks for the hint. Basically I'd always use the local language for the Urls, but I wonder if the japanese symbols are in any kind problematic to read for the search engines.