How Do Domains with Å, Ä, and Ö Work in Practice?
IDN domains are those domains that contain characters other than the classic a-z and numbers. For us in Sweden, this is of course quite interesting since we have our own Swedish characters å, ä, and ö to consider in many words. The most common practice is to simply remove the dots from å, ä, and ö – but there is also the option to use the actual characters in the domain name, so we thought we would take a look at how this works in practice.
At Republic, we recently compiled a few tips and some good advice for those working with interface design. This is a topic that is becoming more and more popular, but at the same time, there are many who haven't quite grasped the concepts, so we hope that this little site can be useful when one starts grappling with GUI issues.
With or Without Dots?
We registered both domains granssnittsdesign.se and gränssnittsdesign.se some time ago, thinking they would come in handy for this site. The absolutely most common choice is to use the "dot-less" domain as the main domain but ensure that the other one also works and redirects people to the main domain.
However, this felt like a good opportunity to see how a domain with Swedish characters performs on its own, so we chose to do the opposite. We selected gränssnittsdesign.se as the primary domain and set up a redirect from the other domain – this turned out to be not entirely problem-free in practice.
Different Ways to Encode a Domain Name
Since the DNS system does not support international characters, something called punycode is used when referring to such domains. In our case, this becomes xn--grnssnittsdesign-wnb.se and thus represents gränssnittsdesign.se – this can be used for redirects but is also what is displayed in the browser in some cases, but we will get to that below. The website idnkonverterare.se is a Swedish site for converting IDN domains back and forth.
In some cases, you may also need to URL-encode your domain, where you can for example use Eric Meyer's converter to URL-encode your address.
Redirects
Here is a little summary of what we noticed as advantages and disadvantages of using a so-called IDN domain instead of a regular one. To get the redirection to work, we had to go through some classic trial and error:
Redirect using .htaccess does not work:
Redirect 301 / http://gränssnittsdesign.se/ # does not work
Redirect 301 / http://xn--grnssnittsdesign-wnb.se/ # does not work
Redirect 301 / http://gr%C3%A4nssnittsdesign.se # seems to work sometimes...
So what does work?
It seems better with mod_rewrite and URL-encoded domain names:
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?granssnittsdesign\.se/$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://gr%C3%A4nssnittsdesign.se [R=301,L]
You can also perform a redirect in PHP if you want; there the puny-coded domain name seems to work best:
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://xn--grnssnittsdesign-wnb.se/" );
Swedish Domains in Practice
In Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, users are redirected to gränssnittsdesign.se, but in Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, and 10, users are instead sent to the puny-coded domain http://xn--grnssnittsdesign-wnb.se/, which works but looks very dull. This could be a dealbreaker for many.
Internet Explorer 6 cannot handle domains with Swedish characters at all, but that is hardly a problem anymore.
In addition to the issues above, problems arise in certain social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook, the domain name often changes to http://xn--grnssnittsdesign-wnb.se/, but it still works. On Twitter, there can be issues since many use services that create shortened versions of URLs, which in turn may not support the Swedish characters.
How Do Swedish Characters Affect Search Results and Ranking on Google?
Many so-called SEO specialists have wondered about this, and the conclusion seems to be that using Swedish characters is not negatively impacting ranking-wise. However, the rewriting issues mentioned above can be somewhat problematic for many.
So, What Should One Choose?
The conclusion is probably that domains with Swedish characters work "perfectly fine" in many cases, but that there is a particular need for better support in Internet Explorer if a large portion of the website's visitors use this browser before it feels like a foolproof option.
The fact that web services like Facebook and Twitter can have some issues may also influence the choice depending on what type of site it is. But in most cases, it works well, even if it can look a bit dull with a puny-coded domain in link texts or in the address bar.