How does Google handle special characters?

How does Google handle ligatures, soft-hyphens, interpuncts and hyphenation points? In general, is it ok to be typographically correct or does this impose problems?

Stecki, Delingsdorf, Germany

[IrishDragon_AoF]

So I have created a website for my client, and I am attempting to use special characters such as ä å ö as well as some french letters in the metadata... would it be best to NOT use these letters?

[nightwind]

@ignas2526 Doesn't UTF-8 include about every possible character?

[timboy]

Zero info about what Google actually does, but a lot of slams on the competition. Thanks Matt!

[tarrakis]

It may affect.
When you publish an article in blogger, it automatically creates the permalink based on its title. If the title includes a special character (such as á ë o ç), it is completely ignored, leaving the permalink with a crippled keyword.

Of course, this is blogger. I don't know about the search engine, but I've read a lot of things. In general, they recommend to write things correctly, since Google's synonim search is really good.

[onwul]

so, does Google Search support at least all letters in UTF-8 encoding?

[abaex]

it could be that google even handles it too correctly because most people seem to write "a" if its actually "ä" and would be written as "ae" if you can't type the ä ö ü stuff...so if they search for something like a company name they could end up getting wrong results...maybe it's better to do this more flexible?

[arimcbrown]

So the answer is: "Just frecking Google it!!!" ?

[alternatereality]

@03timboy Yeah, but at least he was honest and held his hands up, and at least addressed the point to the best of his knowledge.

[katamot]

before optimizing text for search engines, it should be optimized for humans, and last time i checked, people prefer correct typography

[jeffking]

Google strips soft-hyphens and zero-width spaces being indexing. Bing does not.

[guerra_dos_bichos]

well at least for Portuguese characters google randles it pretty well ç, á, é, ô, even hifenized and suprlative words etc. what the webmaster should be concernet is about the charset of the page, if you use the wrong charset and the characters get messed up google will show the results with the messed up chars

[UberCuba]

Well... tbh.. we only care about google seeing as its the best search engine yh...

[hectormorales]

A lot of words and no real answer from an "expert"? What are you, a webmaster of a politician? VERY disappointing to say the least.