slug: should I use latin characters only?

Question

I build a legal portal in a non-latin language (Greek). I want all my content to be thoroughly indexed by search engines, preferably in Greek.

Should I enter my post slugs in Greek? The pages then appear with URLs ending in %20%32%33 etc instead of Greek.

Does this affect the page URLs? Will they be properly indexed by Google? Or should I use latin characters instead?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I will agree with King Li.

Furthermore there is a very old plugin you can download from my dropbox that is still functional and will be of great help to you.

What it does is changing the greek slugs to latin characters (greeklish) automatically for all new posts/pages/custom posts . You will have to manually change your older slugs though. But it is really easy. You just press "Edit" on your slug, delete it and click "Ok". Then, you update your post/page/...

To wrap it up, what you do is:

1. Write your titles in greek. (10 + 1 τρόποι για εξοικονόμηση χρημάτων)
2. The slug is turned from greek to greeklish (10-1-tropi-gia-exikonomisi-chrimaton)
3. Finished

It is one of the very first plugins we activate on greek sites.

Answer 2

There can be problems using non-Latin characters in URLs with different browsers, the user's various browser plugins and sharing the URL (some social media websites don't seem to recognise these characters properly).

I'd suggest to stick with Latin characters for the URL, Google seems to recognise their Latin "counterparts" fairly well anyway and this way you can be sure that the URLs will be compatible with everything.