: Best practices for domain names with foreign characters Suppose you're starting a new web site with the (completely made up name) of "El Niño." Some obvious options for your domain name would

@Nimeshi995

If I were you, I would certainly take both domains, you wouldn't want someone else to use elniño.com when you have a site called elnino.com.

Point both to the same webspace, but choose one as the cannonical one. It can be either, but personally I would go for the one without accents, because it's sure to work from anywhere and avoids compatibility or codepage/locale settings issues.

The issue now is that for SEO, you have what is called duplicate content. To avoid being SEO-penalised for this, you should declare one which version is the cannonical one. The SE will only index the cannonical version then. Declaring the cannonical version is easy. Just add a link tag to the header of each page, like this :

suppose you have a page
elnino.com /warez/list.html

and since you point elniño.com to the same webspace,
elniño.com /warez/list.html

will serve the same content. That page should contain a tag like this in its < head > section :

< link rel="canonical" href="http://elnino.com/warez/list.html" / >

and the SE will be cool with it. Do this for all pages.

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