After releasing ASP.NET MVC previews, URLs have found more important role in web applications. If many developers used to show URLs like /products/showproducts.aspx?pid=14 or /products/14.aspx or even products/14/ in past, now MVC lovers are going to use more friendly URLs like /products/notebook/sony/fz-490; that’s much better. But what if your main language is not English?!

For example assume you’re developing a Persian web application to show news items. Now what to do with URLs? Will you let site administrator add an English translation for headline to show in URL and build a URL like this: /news/2008/8/8/this-is-a-headline/ or show native language words in URL (e.g.: /news/1387/8/8/این-یک-سرخط-خبر-است/)? I chatted to Simone about this and he suggested me use full English URLs instead of a combination of Persian/English characters. He also thought it’s better to keep a unity among all URLs and not to use English URLs somewhere in your application and use non-English (or a combination of both) somewhere else. I agree with him on this and personally I prefer English URLs too.

Another point is that Persian characters are not extended from English and are totally different. For example Simone told me they have characters like à è ò in Italian language but this chars have equivalents like a e o and even if you show URL using native language and characters, you can have equivalent URLs and map them to each other using a simple URL rewriting (So you can satisfy both fans of native and English URLs!); but in Persian language we don’t have this option! Everything will be shown in Persian languages and there is no solution to convert it to a similar English characters URL.

Now let’s take a look at this issue from another point of view: SEO. What is search engine crawlers’ behavior against non-English URLs? Is it better to use native words or not? I have no idea about this because I’m not a SEO expert; so I invite you participate in this discussion by leaving a comment. What is your opinion? What solution you suggest to reach a standard way?

As I told Simone, there aren’t many Persian sites in which they use Persian words in URLs but we have some exceptions too. e.g. Persian Wikipedia (http://fa.wikipedia.org/wiki/صفحهٔ_اصلی). (+ PS: Referencing Keyvan's post, there are non-English domain names too; e.g. Pedram's Persian domain name (www.پدرام.com))

P.S.: Simone invited me to write a blog post about this and open a discussion and also suggested me to talk to Keyvan about it. So, Keyvan, I would be appreciated and so glad if you participate on this topic

P.S. (2): My dear friend Keyvan accepted my invitation to join this thread and wrote a nice blog post about it. Please read this post as well.