Better SEO and clear URLs for every language

When you talk with people, you unavoidably learn something. The same applies when talking with SEO experts –even though their job sounds as straight forward as predicting weather from frog intestines.

Despite it’s shady appearance, SEO is something every serious web service has to do well. Luckily we don’t have to be alone with the job. Good tools can do some of the work for us. I'd say we're in the "good tool" business. So we took what we'd learned from SEO people and put that into Bildy.

Instead of using underscore (_) to separate words in URL's (which makes it visually nice and clear), we switched to dash (-). Although Google has played nice with underscores for few years now, dash is even better playmate to it. To put it simply: your pages will now score even better in Google and other search engines.

Rest assured: this change won't mess up your site. Your links continue working as they did before this update. In site settings, developers now can define their own separators. Sites that are already running, are using underscores, meaning that every link will work as always. New sites will use dash. If you have a reason to use something else as the separator, you can define your own.

Clear, understandable URL's for everyone with UTF-8

While Bildy uses UTF-8 for all it’s data, it made every URL fit the old ASCII URL standard. As we now have Bildy users from all over the globe, this became a problem as not all cultures use the alphabet. This is a global problem which doesn’t have clear solution.

Take Russia for example, a country with 50 million internet users. Apparently their prominent search engine yandex.ru doesn’t give much weight on URLs. This feels really strange at first, but after a while you see why. Russian sites don’t use their own language in URLs. You’ll find id’s, hashes and even words in English. You find completely the opposite of understandable URLs (While we know English, Mandarin is the most spoken language, Hindi is third, and for most of these people English is buch of mambo jambo).

If your PHP supports multibyte strings, Bildy will now create URLs using the native characters. Meaning that you can provide clear URL’s for your local users with your native language. If you don’t have multibyte strings supported, Bildy will fallback to using ID’s in URLs.

The question remains how your service will work in the eyes of foreign cultures and search engines. But now you have the possibility talk to your customers with their own language.