Non-Latin characters in URLs - is it better to encode them or replace with their Latin "counterparts

Posted by Pawel Krakowiak on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Pawel Krakowiak
Published on 2010-04-29T09:40:05Z Indexed on 2010/04/29 10:07 UTC
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We're implementing a blog for a site which supports six different languages and five of them have non-Latin characters in their alphabets. We are not sure whether we should have them encoded (that is what we're doing at the moment)

Létání s potravinami: Co je dovoleno? becomes l%c3%a9t%c3%a1n%c3%ad-s-potravinami-co-je-dovoleno and the browser displays it as létání-s-potravinami-co-je-dovoleno.

or if we should replace them with their Latin "counterparts" (similar looking letters)

Létání s potravinami: Co je dovoleno? becomes letani-s-potravinami-co-je-dovoleno.

I can't find a definitive answer as to what's better from SEO perspective? Search engine optimization is very important for us. Which approach would you suggest?

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