ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is (pending approval) going to be allowing other characters into domain names including Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek Hindi, Japanese and Chinese scripts.
This will be good news for companies in those countries, who will finally be able to register a domain name in the script they prefer rather than having to translate into a western character set.
Concerns are being raised about how exactly this will be implemented the potential for confusion if mixed script domain names are allowed is one of the concerns voiced in the discussion at Webmaster World for instance.
Whenever something like this happens, there are always people concerned about having to buy domain names to protect their identity in the new space. However, as an SEO, I’ve always noticed that it doesn’t matter to our customers if they don’t own both the .co.uk and the .com version of their name, or if someone else owns a version with a hyphen in the middle.
Because we always advocate 301-ing any other domains you own to your main domain name, other versions are not very visible. And for ranking for your own name, SEO will raise the authority of your website such that you will be prominent in any search that is specifically looking for your company. This minimises the opportunities for anyone else to domain squat on a domain pretending to be you, because they just won’t have the weight behind the domain that you have.
So it isn’t necessary for you to register another 1000 versions of your company name in different character sets.
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