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).
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
What are non-ASCII characters in URLs?
Non-ASCII characters are characters outside the standard English alphabet, digits, and basic symbols, such as accented letters, Unicode characters, and non-Latin scripts.
How do non-ASCII characters affect SEO?
They can lead to poor crawlability, duplicate content risk, bad user experience, and link equity dilution.
How can I fix issues caused by non-ASCII characters in URLs?
You can fix them by using only ASCII characters, transliterating non-English characters, using hyphens for readability, implementing 301 redirects for old URLs, and updating internal links.
Why is it important to have clean URLs?
Clean URLs improve crawlability, enhance user experience, increase trustworthiness, and can lead to better click-through rates in search results.