Question

Are special chars like á in alt and title attributes a problem for SEO?

Thanks!
Diego

Answer 1

My opinion… (from years of dealing with SEO headaches)

Search engines may differ in the way they handle HTML entities in search processes and may have trouble displaying or converting search information with special or newer HTML characters.

For instance, Google will search for A when you type "A". Google understands that not everything follows the English alphabet and that there are different foreign chars, accented chars, spellings and terms.

Yahoo! and MSN both return results regarding the number “65”. So, both Yahoo! and MSN strip/remove the escaping characters before processing the search.

The major search engines can read/crawl and interpret your content (w/ html entities) but how the search string is handled becomes engine specific. Regarding the title and alt attributes of elements. The title attribute is generally ignored. I think everyone became wise to the “Stuff tons of relevant search strings into each elements title attribute” just like the “micro mini footer text” epidemic early on and treat both as spamming.

ALT tags however, are typically recognized. You’ll notice a lot of images can be searched on by the alt text. This also has limits– too much text -> treat as spam.

So in short, it depends on how the search engine interprets the users search terms so that it can return relevant/accurate results. Regarding reading of special characters, is pretty standard and can be crawled. This includes alt tags (just don’t overload them with junk) and keep the title tag simple… remember it’s a tooltip, it makes your stuff usable and friendly. 🙂