Non-Unicode Fonts and SEO

[Zippy-Bungle]

For some reason we've translated part of our website into Burmese. The most common font in use in Myanmar (Burma) is called Zawgyi and is non-unicode. Which means that if you look at it in Chrome you get a bunch of squares. That's not a problem because firefox provides support and 9x% of Burmese use firefox.

So two questions

1. Will we get penalised for using non-unicode font?
2. Can google understand the pages and will we rank?

It's worth mentioning that this is 0.001% or less of our traffic and an experiment (and market research) to find out a bit about that market than having much real BL impact

[AlexMcKee]

I would suggest using the Padauk font from SIL instead. This uses the Unicode standard and you should be able to use CSS font embedding to maximise the support for other browsers.

Google should be able to understand the content as long as it is encoded in a standard character set (UTF-8, for example). Even though Zawgyi is not compliant with the Unicode standard your pages should be being served with the UTF-8 character encoding so Google should be able to index the content. I don't think Google pays any attention to the font in use by the design but it is an interesting point which I haven't particularly considered before and which I had to think about carefully before posting this response.