It seems like it’s a little late in being launched, but there are finally web addresses available in Arabic. Until now the Arabic nations had to rely on partial or only English domain structure, causing a lack of structure and no ease of use for non English speakers.
Launched in Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, the so called ‘country codes’ allow the registration and use of Arabic script in the domain name. This is widely seen as the first step towards allowing other symbol based languages a chance to get their own web names. It looks as though China, Tamil and Thai will be following closely.
This will affect SEO in these countries due to the fact in the past the URL structure has only been allowed to include non script letters, and now the rush will be on to get the popular names. Through Google Webmaster tools and through permanent one way redirects, existing website owners can change their address to a new country coded structure.
More than twenty different countries have applied to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, also known as Icann.
Tags: URL Structure