Thai Websites, Url In Thai Or English ? Wikipedia Uses Thai

[frenchfarangjomtien]

Hi,

When making a website in Thai language do you publish it with URLs in Thai as wikipedia ?

http://th.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%99%E0%B9%89%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%81

You will see this in firefox: http://th.wikipedia.org/wiki/หน้าหลัก

(you can see this URL with Thai letters in Firefox, not sure for Internet explorer now)

I wonder if using Thai URLs is better for google indexing or any other reason ?

The problem is that when people copy and paste a Thai URL it will look like %E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%99%E0%B9%89%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%81

and anyway i am not sure that google reads it in Thai and use the keywords in the Thai URL ?

(when using English it's useful to have keywords in address, but in Thai i don't know)

Thanks for ideas.

[Phil Conners]

At the moment when you register a .th domain with www.thnic.co.th you get the (free) option of getting it also in Thai script, so you could point both to your website.

[frenchfarangjomtien]

At the moment when you register a .th domain with www.thnic.co.th you get the (free) option of getting it also in Thai script, so you could point both to your website.

Thank you but I will never register a .co.th before the officials deciding about the conditions to get one buy a brain... And anyway .co.th is useless.

An i don't want a domain name in Thai script, i just wonder if the full URL (what follows the domain name) should be in Thai or English ?

[Phil Conners]

At the moment when you register a .th domain with www.thnic.co.th you get the (free) option of getting it also in Thai script, so you could point both to your website.

Thank you but I will never register a .co.th before the officials deciding about the conditions to get one buy a brain... And anyway .co.th is useless.

An i don't want a domain name in Thai script, i just wonder if the full URL (what follows the domain name) should be in Thai or English ?

Hm, I didn't suggest you should register a .co.th. You need a company for that, but anyone can register a .in.th domain.

For the path name - the part of the URL that follows the domain name - I think you can make it any language you like. I'm quite sure Google and other search engines will just index it as it is.

[bangkokeddy]

The copy and paste problem depends on the board software, my guess.

If you wanna gain page rank with spamming your url on webbords, fora, here, there and everywhere in the interwebs and hope some google bot reads thats and will be impressed by your "link popularity" - forget that.

What is SEO wise better or how to get visitor to your website depends on the nature of the website and for what kind of clientele it is.

a path that goes like

www.example.com/sample/category/subcategory/few_words_about_content

will be probably better as

www.example.com/sample/category/subcategory/looks_like_random_numbers

(looks like random numbers - because it are just numbers and not a problem what language my browser speaks)

"category/subcategory/few_words_about_content" could be now in Thai or English.

If your website is in Thai and for Thais it will probably make sense to use Thai language in the URL path.

What kind of people you want attract with your website? check how and where they move and surf to the internet.

If you wanna make it easy to get the link distributed in the way that visitor recommend the page to others and post a link on web board or other social networks or twitter or so. check if it is there possible to post thai urls or not.

And i guess you are not the first person who discovered problems with thai links on certain webboards so workarounds for surely exist and Thai user know how to use them.

a service like http://goo.gl/ could be used to make links shorter and avoid broken links.

like for your example, a workaround would be to use the insert link option.

As the URL "http://goo.gl/Q1Nvx" and as LINK text i used the the original link containing Thai. the board software seem to accept that.

http://th.wikipedia.org/wiki/หน้าหลัก

A search engine robot will not take this link into consideration to give you a higher page rank, but a human search engine user who looks for something like "few_words_about_content" might find the link to your site this way and than finally to you.

Or our human, in search of something your website has to offer too, comes to a longer list of links and scans them with his eyes

www.example1.com/.../few_words_about_content

www.example2.com/.../looks_like_random_numbers

www.example3.com/.../few_words_about_content

...

www.example7.com/.../words_about_content_IN_THAI

what he will click?

I am not a SEO, don't know what will be better in the end. I guess there are pros and cons. that a thai link on TVF could be look like %E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%99%E0%B9%89%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%AB is probably a minor issue.