Do search engines understand html?

I am putting together a web page in Japanese for a client, but his current platform does not support Japanese character sets. Rather than building a new site, I was planning to use &# HTML coding for the Japanese text.

Do search engines understand this as being Japanese text?

If not, then they can't produce results when someone uses actual Japanese characters in a web search.

Or are they smart enough to convert the code into proper language in order to produce search results?

JB

 

Depends, but the main thing is that you must focus on the main keyword you optimize. Google can translate words.

 

Thanks,

I understand about focusing on specific words and phrases, but do they have to be in Japanese characters, or can those keywords be in html code?

This is the bit that's unclear.

JB

 

hmmm, well it is up to you, if you are targetting Japanese people there is no problem with that.

 

Maybe I am not explaining the problem very well. I aplogise if this is the case.

We do want to target Japanese customers, that's why I am preparing a Japanese language page for my client. However, when I copy and paste the actual Japanese text into his site, it will not accept it. The data base was not built to accept asian chanracters.

The easiest way around this is to use html code to display the Japanese text.

[&#2334] etc.

However, will a search engine understand what this bit of code means?

If it just sees it as a set of random symbols and numbers then it will not know what the page is all about or where to list the page in its index.

On the other hand, will the search engine read it and think "hey, this is the html code for Japanese, and this code means 'we sell widgets' so I will index it under widgets"

Hopefully that helps to make my query clearer.

Thanks

JB

 

I think yes, there are lots of japanese websites in Google.

 

Google can read HTML and it can translate the words. Also it can use LSI to figure out similar words. Hope that helps.

 

you don't have to worry about it as google can read HTML and they have algorithm that will convert each of your site codes into their codes....just like when your using computer....the text that we see was converted into binary codes to be read by computers...process where happening inside them....

 

That's good to know and I appreciate the feedback on Google.

However, Yahoo is the no.1 SE in Japan with the vast share of the market, so do they also havr the ability to convert html?

Also, would a site created completely in ASCII have any difficulty in getting indexed?

Top engines in Japan are:

1) Yahoo
2) Google
3) Infoseek
4) Msn
5) Goo
6) Nifty
7) Excite
8) Bigloble
9) Hi-ho
10) Dion

JB