Google Webmaster Central has announced that it is now supporting the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) movement which lets site owners secure domains which are not limited to the basic letters of the English Alphabet, numbers 0-9 or hyphens. The IDNA can support domains in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and other languages which do not use alphabetic characters.

“With IDNA support, you’ll now be able to add your sites that use other character sets, and organize them easily on your Webmaster Tools Dashboard.”

Google uses Peking University’s URL, http://????.cn/, as an example and how Webmaster Central previously could not accept this URL, but now can (even though many computers cannot).

As IDNA domains grow, search engines and Internet services will also have to change in order to address the companies and publishers selecting these domains over normal domaining structure.

More from the Google Webmaster Central Blog.