Are there advantages or disadvantages to use "Remove accents from question URLs:"?

Question

My Q&A localhost web site is in Portuguese. It is not clear for me whether I should remove accents from question urls. It seems that the same post is uploaded whether you include accents or not!

Is it just aesthetics? I mean maybe some browsers do not support accents and the url becomes utf-8 code?

Answer 1

Most search engines can perfectly handle special characters. Some don't. If you remove them, then your site would be easily indexed by those search engines.

Additionally, special characters are usually turned into the awful but handy %xx patterns which can turn a readable URL into what seems to be a character soup.

So I think it is a little of both reasons: technical and aesthetic.

Comments

what about user behavior, for vietnamese instance , almost people typing for search without accents , because vietnamese still have meaning without accents, wont it help if I remove accents