IDNs and the Potential Impact on Search

It was announced by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) this week that International Domain Names (IDNs) are to be made available by early to mid 2010. IDNs will allow for registration of domain names that do not use the latin alphabet, instead using local language characters, for example Chinese or Arabic. ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush described the new system as “the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago”.

Some countries, such as China and Thailand, have already introduced workarounds that allow computer users to enter web addresses in their own language. However, these were not internationally approved and do not work on all computers. Support for 100,000 international characters would make traditional keyboards insufficient input devices for accessing the entire Internet.

The impact of this change on the SEO industry has the potential to be significantly concerning, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. The change shouldn’t affect search campaigns where a site owner is solely interested in Australian traffic, however it may add an extra layer of complexity to strategies if a website is trying to capture traffic from the countries that end up embracing IDNs.

One of the most talked about concerns with IDNs is the new angle that will be made available to scammers and fraudsters. Phishing is a form of Internet fraud that aims to steal valuable information such as credit cards, social security numbers, user IDs and passwords from unsuspecting internet users. Anti-Phishing Working Group reported this month that non-Latin characters could help phishers spoof legitimate websites with similar characters. For example, a phishing website set up to mimic the online payment website paypal.com could use a Cyrillic “a” instead of an ASCII “a,” making it a technically different web address but similar enough to fool users. So far at least, phishers have not been using such tricks at a high frequency, but the proliferation of new international web addresses could present the opportunity. Site security factors heavily in search engine ranking algorithms, and this may become an even more important factor as malware injections become more feasible.

The ICANN has stated on their website that ccTLDs (country code top level domains eg. com.au for Australia) will be available to the governments of countries who wish to use languages based on scripts other than Latin. This is significant as it’s generally agreed that having a local ccTLD will have a positive impact in search engine rankings in that country.

In order to attain strong rankings in a particular region, not only is it important that your content targets that region in the correct language, but also link building strategies should be conducted in the target language. It is likely that this change will cause the internet to become more highly segregated, and websites utilising new IDNs will not (initially at least) have as many natural linking sources as other latin-character based websites.

Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics are two great resources for webmasters to track diagnostic issues and monitor user activity on your site, but whether Google opens their services up to non-latin character based websites remains to be seen.

We would love to hear others thoughts on this change – how do you feel it will impact on search, or the web in general?

Resources:
http://www.icann.org
http://en.wikipedia.org
http://searchengineland.com
http://www.ethioplanet.com
http://www.internetnews.com

Tags: IDN, international domain name, Paid Search, search, SEO