P2Issue #15

URL: Non ASCII Characters

❓ What does it mean?

What does it mean? A non-ASCII character is any character outside the standard English alphabet, digits, and basic symbols. Examples: Accented letters → é, ñ, ö Unicode characters → ✓, ©, ® Non-Latin scripts → हिंदी, 中文, عربي When these characters appear in URLs, browsers and search engines automatically percent-encode them (e.g., ✓ → %E2%9C%93). This leads to long, unreadable URLs that can cause issues in: SEO (duplicate URLs, crawl errors). Sharing (broken links in emails/social media). User trust (messy, confusing URLs).

🚨 Why is it important for SEO?

Why is it bad for SEO? Poor Crawlability → Search engines may misinterpret or normalize encoded URLs. Duplicate Content Risk → example.com/mañana ≠ example.com/manana (Google may see two URLs). Bad User Experience → Encoded URLs look spammy: https://example.com/product/%E2%9C%93special-offer Link Equity Dilution → Backlinks may split between versions.

✅ How to Fix It

How to Fix It Use only ASCII characters → a–z, 0–9, -, _. Transliterate non-English characters → mañana → manana café → cafe Use hyphens for readability → special-offer instead of special_offer or %20offer. 301 Redirect old URLs → If you already have non-ASCII URLs indexed, redirect them to clean versions. Update internal links → Ensure all menus, sitemaps, and canonical tags use the clean version.

❌ Bad Example

Example ❌ Bad (with Non-ASCII characters): https://example.com/café-recetas https://example.com/हिंदी/पुस्तक Search engines will encode: https://example.com/caf%C3%A9-recetas https://example.com/%E0%A4%B9%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%82%E0%A4%A6%E0%A5%80/%E0%A4%AA%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%B8%E0%A5

✅ Good Example

✅ Good (ASCII-only, SEO-friendly): https://example.com/cafe-recetas https://example.com/hindi-pustak

⚡ Result

⚡ Result URLs are clean, short, and shareable. Improved crawlability and no duplicate encoding issues. Better CTR in search results (readable links build trust).