# Keep diacritics in your content, strip them from your URLs

- Category: seo
- Author: Doru (https://indie.md/people/doru-bota/)
- Source: https://indie.md/events/indie-tm-9-timisoara-may-2026/
- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/advice/diacritics-in-content-not-urls/

On a Romanian site, the diacritics question has a practical answer. Google treats "programari" and "programări" as equivalent, so writing correct Romanian with diacritics in your body copy, headings, and titles carries no ranking penalty and reads as more credible to a human. Where diacritics genuinely cause trouble is in URL slugs, file names, and image alt text, where encoding breaks links and tooling. So the rule most Romanian practitioners settle on: diacritics in the content the reader sees, none in the identifiers the machine parses. The same logic applies to any language with accented characters.