Does anyboy knows for a fact if there is a difference search engine wise for keywords on your website if they have accent or not?

My concern is that most of my designs are in spanish and I would like to optimize them but I'm not sure the effect that will have if I put keyword with the correct form like promocion is different as promoción btw promoción = Promotion in English. Does the accent in the keywords will affect the way the search engine treat my site? Will I have any problems with the customers that don't put the accent in their search?

My experience with search results has been that the major search engines rank results first by using the same language that the query used, then further down in the results, translating the query into other languages.

If you're expecting that the typical visitor to your site coming from a search engine will be using accented letters when they search, then using the accents on your page should improve your rank in the results. But if not, you could be penalizing yourself, especially if your keywords are in the page title, or a headline on the page.

Depending on how critical this decision is, you might also consider duplicating important entry pages so you have sets both with and without accented letters, and placing links to the duplicates on a site map page so the spiders find and index them.

Thanks for your reply, I had this idea but sometimes when you have a big fat site like mine. I have aprox. 300 total pages you know my answer...jejejej. But yeah I think your aproach will be the most suitable for small websites. Also I have the concern that google will ban me thinking I'm spamming. Wich is not the intention, but you know how it goes.....


Thank you for your input appreciated.